AppleSoft BASIC in JavaScript

April 4, 2013 7:12 AM

AppleSoft BASIC in JavaScript. If you ever fiddled with AppleSoft BASIC back in the day, get ready for some serious nostalgia.
posted by Deathalicious (19 comments total)

The example is missing "20 GOTO 10" but seems legit otherwise.
posted by (parenthetic me) at 7:55 AM on April 4, 2013 [6 favorites]

"The example is missing "20 GOTO 10" but seems legit otherwise." Ha! That was the first thing I did.
posted by Captain_Science at 8:09 AM on April 4, 2013

Yeah... me too. Hi, I'm a professional programmer and a responsible adult, but sometimes I still really enjoy seeing a screen filled with endless lines of "FUCK YOU!"
posted by ph00dz at 8:37 AM on April 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Oh, man. I had a Commodore 64 at home, but when I got to use the Apple ][ machines at school I was always really jealous of those plot, hlin and vlin commands.
posted by usonian at 8:47 AM on April 4, 2013

I wonder if the bugs got fixed.

Like the ones that make softporn adventure crash if you skip the 2nd gal. (it was hardcoded to say you "won" if you got to #3 but would crash before getting to that point.)
posted by rough ashlar at 8:54 AM on April 4, 2013

10 PRINT "THIS IS ALL I KNOW HOW TO DO"
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:21 AM on April 4, 2013

Was there an Apple version of the famous WAIT6502 easter egg that Bill Gates put in the Commodore version?
posted by garius at 9:24 AM on April 4, 2013

Hey, guys, look what happens when I type "20 GOTO"... aww, shit, you've heard of it too?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:29 AM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

I daren't visit this, much as I daren't re-install the Apple ][ emulator I started playing with a few years ago.

I'll just use it to re-create the CLI conversation between Matthew Broderick and Joshua about what game to play, and I'll be sucked back through time and space to 1983, disappearing from this world and reality.

Much as I would like the metabolism of my 14-year-old self, there are many advantages to being my current age. I'm still rubbish with the opposite sex, but at least I have my own apartment now and way fewer issues with acne. ;)
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:59 AM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

It jsut flooded back to me that if I wanted to alter how my program ran, I had to retype in the lines, with new line numbers, and hoped that I had left enough gaps between the line numbers that I could fit in what I needed. And I still enjoyed programming. This makes me think I'd also have enjoyed just endlessly picking at a combination lock until I stumbled upon how to open it.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:03 AM on April 4, 2013

10 print "butts ";
20 goto 10

Okay I'm done here.
posted by egypturnash at 10:14 AM on April 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

It's missing the real fun of an apple II: "Except for a small number of compatibility shims for common operations (e.g. keyboard strobe), commands that refer to assembly routines (PEEK, POKE, CALL, USR etc.), shape tables, or tape I/O are not implemented."
posted by sfred at 10:33 AM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

I immediately tried to run CALL -151 and drop into the Monitor ROM. Then I realized I'm a huge nerd.
posted by epilnivek at 10:40 AM on April 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

You dang kids with yer webby sites and yer fancy Apple II's. If you really wanna go old school, the original Apple I Basic has been resurrected from a cassette tape so now you can run it natively on a modern Mac.
posted by gamera at 10:49 AM on April 4, 2013

Anyone that's done the 10 PRINT "BUTTS" 20 GOTO 10 thing on an apple ][ knows that the print should be 13 characters long when doing the concat. Then you get the cool scrolling trick.

10 PRINT "BUTTS........";
20 GOTO 10

Of course, this thing runs way too freaking fast to notice it. So try this:

10 PRINT "BUTTS........";
20 FOR I = 1 to 200
30 NEXT I
40 GOTO 10

It's odd that prints fly like crazy on this emulator, but a FOR loop is crazy slow in relative speed.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:07 AM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

And, of course, the classic "Gob's Program":

10 PRINT "Penus ";
20 GOTO 10

posted by SpiffyRob at 11:27 AM on April 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

No POKE? Feh!
posted by benito.strauss at 12:24 PM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Oh the memories! This brought tears to my eyes.
posted by Annabelle74 at 2:35 PM on April 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Here's that mazey type generation thing that was a popular link a ways back ported over to use Apple's ASCII table:

10 PRINT CHR$(47 + 45 * INT(RND(1) * 2));
20 goto 10

posted by clawtros at 10:08 AM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]