ECS Basic Tape Files

[Peripheral]

Some recent threads peaked my interest in the old ECS Basic games at

http://spatula-city.org/~intvlib/inty/ecsbasic.html

 

It takes some effort to try them out, as you need to enter the ECS Basic
source.  But with the jzintv simulated cassette tape, they can be saved
to a file, and loaded as needed.  @intvdave took the time to do so for
some of the games, and provided them in posts #7 and #27 at

 

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/286411-jzintv-christmas-update

 

Posts #66 and #67 in that thread have updated versions of nc1
and bombrun2, and post #68 has an updated nc2, provided by @Zendocon.

 

To prevent duplicate effort, I fleshed out the remaining old games, and added
in the above contributions, all in the attached ecs_basic_27_feb_2021.zip file.
Be warned that not all of the games are playable.  The zip file has a
readme.txt giving more details on each game.

 

The thread at https://atariage.com/forums/topic/284474-ecs-basic-color-coding-patent
discusses the poor performance of the Intellivision ECS Basic engine.
In spite of this, I found a few of the games to be interesting.
Perhaps someone more motivated than I could convert and package
them all in a single IntyBasic game.

 

There is one issue I couldn't figure out, but isn't holding anything up.
When I typed in Inty Road Race, and deleted the unsupported "!" character
in a PRIN statement, my saved ecs_tape_ROAD.ecs file did not match
the one provided by @intvdave.  I eyeballed the LISTings side by side,
but couldn't spot a difference.  I then tried a binary search, deleting
chunks at a time and resaving the files, and narrowed down the difference
to be near

 

    300 CLR
    310 FOR C=1TO11

 

If I delete statements 300 and beyond, the saved files are identical.
But if I keep statement 300, they differ.  So I'm just curious if
the tape format is non-deterministic.  I've given up on this, but
if anyone wants to dig further, my progress is in the attached road.zip.
Subdirectory y0 contains intvdave's tape files, and y1 contains mine.
File z299, for example, is the saved ecs_tape_ROAD.ecs after deleting
all statements above 299.
 

ecs_basic_27_feb_2021.zip road.zip

[Zendocon]

I'm glad you took the time to go through all these.  The person who created Inty Road Race didn't know at the time the ECS keyboard didn't have a '!' character.  When I reproduced it on my old website, I replaced them all with '?'.

 

I had noticed a few mistakes when I grabbed the Bomb Run and Number Cruncher source files.  I made sure they all worked correctly before I saved the .ecs files.

 

Two of the game series, Think Fast and Fall Of The Human Race, could be interesting if I gave them another crack.  I've been working on other things lately.

 

Actually, I was thinking of making an ECS BASIC Library into a complete game package using IntyBASIC.  I just didn't know how much interest there would be.

[Intelligentleman]

That would cool. But yeah outside of myself and a few others, not sure if it would be useful to a large audience...

[rietveld]

On 2/28/2021 at 11:14 AM, Intelligentleman said:

That would cool. But yeah outside of myself and a few others, not sure if it would be useful to a large audience...

I would take a copy.  I have 2 ECS intv setups