BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding(bbcmicrobot.com)
bbcmicrobot.com
BBC Micro Bot – Creative Retro Coding
https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/owlet-test2.html
17 comments
We're already there in some respects. Octo is a Chip-8 + extensions IDE/emulator which runs as a web app. It's been used for game jams and things like that.
https://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/
https://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/
They were already performant enough when converted into Flash and Crossbridge.
It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story.
This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.
This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.
I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read.
Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step.
I should get mine out of the attic and try typing some of these in! (Colour composite output might be a quick solder away: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composi... )
edit: there's also a 'shrink/expand' tool in the editor :-)
Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step.
I should get mine out of the attic and try typing some of these in! (Colour composite output might be a quick solder away: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composi... )
edit: there's also a 'shrink/expand' tool in the editor :-)
This is a good blog post explaining some of the golfing techniques applicable to BBC BASIC:
https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/
https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/
Good site, the following post shows a step by step minification of a program and how to make effects with colour cycling.
Many of the tweets are encoded in base2048, to squeeze the most out of the 288 character limit.
Paste the base2048 into the editor at https://bbcmic.ro/ and click 'expand'. Expanding it a second time will elongate any abbreviated BASIC keywords.
Paste the base2048 into the editor at https://bbcmic.ro/ and click 'expand'. Expanding it a second time will elongate any abbreviated BASIC keywords.
When I programmed in BASIC for the Apple II there were some tools to optimize code - cramming everything possible in single lines and making variable names shorter increased speed a little and made the memory footprint of the program smaller. I'm sure the BBC had similar tools.
This is incredible! I found a fun graphic, and immediately was able to Expand it, then edit it to make my own variation. I've never used Micro Bot Basic ever, but it's close enough to straight programming to figure it out.
Kudos!
Kudos!
This is superb! Takes me back to my very first computer and the thing I first programmed back in the 80s.
Technology is such an embarrassment of riches! Highly promising environments like this are too numerous to keep track of. And nobody uses any of them.
would this code work for programming microbit?
No. They are completely different computers. The Microbit doesn't have BASIC or video output. It's also vastly more powerful than the BBC Micro.
Not sure, but it could be more powerful than the Acorn Archimedes, the first ARM workstation, apart from IO capabilities.
Not sure, but it could be more powerful than the Acorn Archimedes, the first ARM workstation, apart from IO capabilities.
https://github.com/mattgodbolt/jsbeeb
I feel like there is a renaissance afoot. These old school emulators are highly performant in the browser. And it's only a matter of time until some intrepid developer releases a full fledged app, akin to Briklin & Frankston's VisiCalc, that launches them from the creative ghetto of "retro computing" and into the mainstream!