My father owned a TI-99/4A and used it to teach me some programming. Afterwards I mostly just copied listings from the TI-jdingen magazine (published by the Dutch TI users group TIGG [0]). Together with my dad I also made a small game. Nothing to impressive. Basically just a ship that automatically moved from the left to the right side of the screen. The player could press a button to shoot a projectile on randomly generated airplanes that would fly from right to left.
I know Edsger Dijkstra considered the BASIC language to cause brain damage [1], but still at times I feel like it would be nice to program in a language like TI-BASIC again, just modernised a bit.
Mostly stuff you see in other modern BASIC variants. Like line numbers removed. Labels for GOSUB. Multiline scope for things like IF THEN ELSE, etc... GOTO should be removed as well. And I'd like to see a BASIC specifically developed for making games and also working for iOS, Android, ... Perhaps such a BASIC language already exists by the way, I haven't done a whole lot of research on this.
I'm curious, then: why not use the modern variants? What is it about the TI BASIC experience that you'd rather have?
Reason I'm asking is I'm working actively on a TBA project around retro-ish BASIC hardware/software as a learning / confidence-building tool. I'm genuinely curious.
Related: have you seen the PICO-8 system? It's Lua, but it's specifically designed for games, has some nice constraints that encourage a certain retro look & feel, and is pretty approachable.
I kinda like to see the same kind of environment I guess. But somewhat improved for the modern age.
Recently I was discussing with my brother that I got kinda annoyed that software got so complex these days. The simplicity of the TI-99/4A stuff was kinda nice. It was pretty easy to get some nice results quickly. The language was quite limited which made it easy to learn. For games I guess it's kinda nicer to work with PNGs these days then to figure out what HEX codes to use to draw a sprite, but with tooling that could be eased a bit. The resolution of the TI-99/4A made this stuff more manageable as well I guess.
Yes, I find the PICO-8 charming, perhaps that's kinda what I'm looking for. But PICO-8 might maybe be too limited. If I'm not mistaken the screen resolution seems lower than what the TI had, causing the graphics to become quite ugly (imo).
Actually I've been contemplating on creating my own TI-BASIC interpreter as well. And after finishing the interpreter, my goal would be to modernise the language for my purposes. But I haven't really started on that yet (and not yet sure I will, since there's other stuff I work on as well). Another area that I would improve upon would be sound generation, since the sounds of these machines aren't too easy on the ears.
I know Edsger Dijkstra considered the BASIC language to cause brain damage [1], but still at times I feel like it would be nice to program in a language like TI-BASIC again, just modernised a bit.
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[0]: http://www.ti-99.nl
[1]: https://programmingisterrible.com/post/40132515169/dijkstra-...