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Yes - I've got a few lined up. No spoilers!

I think a native Sinclair BASIC version of your game would be so slow it would be unplayable. That's just the nature of anything drawing to the screen at that full-screen scale. Perhaps if you stored each possible screen as a 704 character string and just redrew it over the top of itself... Hmmm... But still might be slow or a bit of a slideshow like some of the 8-bit ports of Dragon's Lair.

Wow - this is impressive. Getting any sort of action game working at a decent speed in stock Sinclair BASIC is always difficult. But to do it in PUR-80 rather than EXTREME-256 is even more impressive. I can't stop playing it! Well done mcphail!

Impressive speed!

I did consider it, but because the ZX81 only supports one BASIC statement per line, it seemed less necessary than the Spectrum version. You don’t see a lot of EXTREM-256 entries for the ZX81!

Thanks for the fix - works great now. I still love how fast and difficult the game is - keeps me coming back for more! Reminds me a lot of Donkey Kong and Chuckie Egg, but sped up!

Haha! Don't forget to delete lines 100-108 before submitting your 10 liner!

Loving this game - I like how 1980s hard it is! Unfortunately the Spectrum version has a crash that reboots after you lose all your lives. Tried various emulators and real hardware.

You’re right - the music is such an important part of the experience. Insane that this works on a system from the late 70s!

Did you manage to get it to fit within the contest character limits in the end?

I've found that most original TINY BASIC program listings can be made to work with my version. As long as they don't use the '@' array. My insistence on 'LET' and 'GOTO' also has to be taken into consideration. Back in the 70s, they really were counting every single byte!

Yeah - pleased to meet a fellow TINY BASIC enthusiast! Not many of my friends had heard of it. it reminds me a lot of programming for the ZX81 where you can't have multiple statements per line with colons. So nested IFs become quite useful to squeeze more out of each line. Was hoping to include some error handling but I prioritised getting as many of the original TINY BASIC commands in as possible. The trickiest command to implement was PRINT - I really wanted to be able to have combinations of text mixed with variables using semi-colons. In the end, I only managed to get text OR variables not both. But I did manage to get semi-colons at the end of PRINT statements to stop a carriage return if you want the next PRINT/INPUT statement to follow straight on.

Thanks - was lovely to see someone using it to check the line length of their own projects. That's what it's all about!

Thanks for using Ten Liner Counter! Hope it was useful.

Thanks - my first dabble with PUR-80. You really do have to get creative to squeeze things into 80 characters.

Haha! Maybe you could move them in version 2.0 ;-)

Thanks - a lot of my teenage years were lost to Windows 3.1 Minesweeper!

Thanks - this is one that I keep coming back to play. Managed to defeat the mighty Heinz Baked Beans with a supermarket-own tin from Lidl!

Great fun! I loved the original in the 90s. So much so that I wrote my tribute to it for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum as part of this year's BASIC 10 Liner contest: https://bunsen.itch.io/barcode-battle-zx-spectrum-by-matthew-begg - please check it out!

What an honour Marco - thanks for putting my TinyBasic through its paces. Proof that you can write meaningful code in it. Love that you jacked up the speed so much - told you it was slow ;-) 

This is a really fun game! Quite addictive. Can't believe how responsive it is and how it's got an in-game soundtrack. In a computer released in 1980!

Lovely work. Reminds me of Repton, Rick Dangerous and Shovel Adventure. But more impressive by being written in 10 lines of BASIC.

Hi Andrew - yes I remember meeting you at Crash Live. I've emailed you via Retro Gamer - look forward to talking to you.

These are so fun! I think 'Convoy' is my favourite. Only got a high score of 6 so far! Impressive what can be done in 1 line of BASIC.

Love this game! I like the way the difficulty ramps up slowly and the ticking of the bomb gets more and more stressful.

Fun game. Nice and colourful!

I love this! Great use of the SGN function. The 10x10 grid of characters is clever - gives you a total of 93 characters. Thought I'd have a go at porting this to the ZX Spectrum:

1 INPUT m: LET n=1+INT (RND*m): FOR t=1 TO 99: INPUT (t);"?";g: LET d=SGN (n-g): PRINT CHR$ (61+d): LET t=t+99*NOT d: NEXT t

Managed to get it into 1 line of BASIC using just 68 characters (gotta love the Spectrum tokenisation storing keywords in 1 character!). Not as pretty as the 10x10 grid, but kept the same gameplay as the original (unless it takes the player more than 99 guesses!) 

Anyone fancy trying to make it even smaller on another platform? What about you Commodore lot?

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you so much for featuring me in your magazine. I was more than happy to buy a digital copy and support your new venture. Glad you enjoyed my 'ZXFM' and 'Hardware Hustle' games!

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you so much for featuring me in your magazine. I was more than happy to buy a digital copy and support your new venture. Glad you enjoyed my 'ZXFM' and 'Hardware Hustle' games!

It's like the 'Guess Who' board game, but with blood spatter and a ticking clock time limit - I love it!