basic-computer-games

### What are we doing?

We’re updating the first million selling computer book, [BASIC Computer Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games), for 2022 and beyond!

- [Read the original book](https://archive.org/details/basiccomputergam0000unse) (pdf)
- [Play the original games in your browser](https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index.html)

### Where can we discuss it?

Please see [the discussion here](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/-/7927) for a worklog and conversation around this project.

### Project structure

I have moved all [the original BASIC source code](http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html) into a folder for each project in the original book (first volume). Note that Lyle Kopnicky has generously normalized all the code (thanks Lyle!) to run against [Vintage Basic](http://www.vintage-basic.net/download.html) circa 2009:

> I’ve included all the games here for your tinkering pleasure. I’ve tested and tweaked each one of them to make sure they’ll run with Vintage BASIC, though you may see a few oddities. That’s part of the fun of playing with BASIC: it never works quite the same on two machines. The games will play better if you keep CAPS LOCK on, as they were designed to be used with capital-letter input.

Each project has subfolders corresponding to the languages we’d like to see the games ported to. This is based on the [2022 TIOBE index of top languages](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) that are _**memory safe**_ and _**general purpose scripting languages**_ per [this post](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/-/7927/34):

1. C#
2. Java
3. JavaScript
4. Kotlin
5. Lua
6. Perl
7. Python
8. Ruby
9. Rust
10. VB.NET

> 📢 Note that in March 2022 we removed Pascal / Object Pascal and replaced it with Rust as we couldn’t determine if Pascal is effectively memory safe. We’ve also added Lua, as it made the top 20 in TIOBE (as of 2022) and it is both memory safe and a scripting language. The Pascal ports were moved to the alternate languages folder.

> ⚠️ Please note that we have decided, as a project, that we **do not want any IDE-specific or build-specific files in the repository.** Please refrain from committing any files to the repository that only exist to work with a specific IDE or a specific build system.

### Alternate Languages

If you wish to port one of the programs to a language not in our list – that is, a language which is either not memory safe, or not a general purpose scripting language, you can do so via the `00_Alternate_Languages` folder. Place your port in the appropriate game subfolder, in a subfolder named for the language. Please note that these ports are appreciated, but they will not count toward the donation total at the end of the project.

### Project goals

Feel free to begin converting these classic games into the above list of modern, memory safe languages. In fact, courtesy of @mojoaxel, you can even view the JavaScript versions in your web browser at

<https://codin