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Comment by ScottAdams

Really good question!

I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic.

I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them.

I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC.

I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired.

Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!

parent ScottAdams 5 years ago

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