It's been a while! I'm trying not to kill my love for the hobby via RUclips demands, so I took my time enjoying this system while also filming it. I also filmed my newly acquired Mindset II and some other stuff in depth, so hopefully the resulting videos will come out a little faster. I'm working on finding more dg software for another round with my z80 in the future. Also, I made a commemorative dg t-shirt which is linked above for those interested. And again, I did my best to murder the 15khz CRT whine that annoys younger ears. I can't hear or see it on my spectrum analyzer so hopefully we're good there. Enjoy!
that something that puts me of some RUclips channels, they get some viewers, and next thing there nocking out video every 10 minutes, the very Quality some what subjective attribute that may be understood differently by different people just go out the widow, just to chase views, on there channel?
Ah, Biorhythms. I remember it well. Back in the early 80s you'd still find program listings for this and I remember typing one in and me and my friend were horrified to see that apparently we were all going flatline in the year 2000. The joys of working with two digit dates...
Even taking into account the character resolution is ~32×16, the pixel resolution of whatever they're using to generate the display is surprisingly high!
Correct, yes. I think I accidentally cut out some footage though where I had the end statement and it still gave error 12. Right in that sequence it was getting progressively less stable. Reseating and rebooting seemed to clear it.
A car parts store will sell plastic pry tools for auto body repair. I've found them useful for everything from opening boxes, prying apart non-car bits, and even scraping flat surfaces without risk of damaging surfaces or cutting myself. I'm sure others will have even better ideas but putting that out to assist. Great video!
I'll have to look into those. Various youtubers were using xacto blades and they also had this splicer tool you lay the tape in and do a diagonal cut with. I never knew actual cassette repair tools existed!
Kinda unrelated but I tried finding one of those in a size that could pry open an iPod mini, but gave up. Months later for unrelated reasons I ordered a screwdriver bit-set roll pack and waddya know it came with a plastic pry bar inside. I was not impressed lol
Dang! I was hoping to see my favorite basic game: Zork... Although that's basically an 80's game that loaded off a 5 ¼" floppy and registered various inputs such as N,S,E,W for directions and other simple commands like"look at" or "get (object). All text based responses on a green screen and I remember buying graph paper to create my own personal map of the world. No save options back in those days. Still, it was good for hours of fun on my old IBM XT clone. 🖥️
If you noticed the descriptions of each tape in the sales flyer at 2:40 the games are almost all direct conversions from 101 BASIC Computer Games. Presumably this is the David Ahl book which can be found on the Web. It contains all the programs you tried and comes with detailed instructions for each of them.
I loved that book. I had the Micro-Computer Edition, the yellow cover and a guy with his arm on a robot's shoulders. I had a C64 as a kid in the mid 80's. I was in the talented and gifted program in my school district and its library had this book. I borrowed the book over the summer one year. Unfortunately the talented and gifted program ended after that year, likely due to funding, and I wasn't ever able to return the book. I still have it in my collection. The game Hammurabi (which we all pronounced ham-uh-robby) was a favorite in my class. It's hard to be a Babylonian king. And yeah, as a kid, the Russian Roulette game baffled me. I totally didn't get it. There's even a drawing adjacent to the listing in the book of a robot tethered to a computer case with a wire and the robot is pointing a gun at the case. This book, along with the C64 programming manual, taught me to program as a kid and that's what pays my bills today.
I wish s-100 stuff wasn't so expensive, been looking for a basic machine to mess with even if I have to use my PET or model III as a terminal to use it but when a IMSAI 8080 backplane goes for $200 on ebay and any other boards are north of $300 it kind of hurts.
I still have my 1970s Dr Dobbs collection, together with my own annotations where I'd ported code like Palo Alto Tiny Basic onto my own hardware, and Steve Wosniak's floating point routines. These were great times, when you could still know, understand, and maintain everything from a basic program to component level.
Oof.. I forgot to mention that. I tried loading them various ways but they did not appear to be Tiny BASIC related. I'm not really sure what they are. They don't load into any other BASIC I have and don't appear to be standalone programs either.
Brain Teaser would be that when you pick a position 1-9 [square is (1,2,3)(4,5,6)(7,8,9) ] then it will flip that square AND its left, right, above and below squares. So 5 would flip 2,4,5,6,8, 8 would flip 8,7,8,9 and 1 would flip 1,2,4 - and you want to flip all the positions to 1 (probably)
It looks like if you ignore the END command then Tiny BASIC continues to look through the buffer and when it gets to what it thinks is line 65535 it finds invalid code.
Chomp is also documented in your copy of David Aho's Basic Computer Games. There's also a version of checkers, which I would expect to be similar to the one on on your tape. I know, because I have a copy of the same book, bought new at Radio Shack back in the day. :)
4:15 thieves even though he didn't steal anything Legally acquired original paper tape, and presumably: purchased the paper he used to make copies, and was authorized to use the copier (or owned) - it's always amusing to watch people try and explain how copying and duplication are theft in any capacity - the only friend they have is the law, but logic dictates no theft has occurred. Digital piracy is a myth (and logical fallacy).
I've always wondered whether you could singi basic code turned into lyrics over music to create a song that when run gave an answer. Bill Gates is a snake. Thats why i use Linux and game on PlayStation.
Why not use a sacrificial cassette case with screws to stop using glue? I kinda the whole "let's preserve the original as it was", but ... CA glue? Ufff!
I just wanted to preserve the original dg shells. It was very tempting to switch to screws but I figured I was digitizing these and probably wouldn't use them much going forward.. so might as well leave appearance correct.
I had as my first computer, the TI 99 4A, 16K color. Hooked up to a color tv, it's own cassette recorder, all cables. Books. A Christmas gift from Mom, 1983. I took a "Computer Concepts" course and it had BASIC. The satellite center (nearby Pathfinder Regional Vocational H.S.) with my then, maternal grandmother, the high school had an IBM 360, blue. BASIC on both systems. I have to add that my entree into robots/computers was re-runs of "Lost In Space" 1965-68 version, beginning in 1978. WLVI(then) in Boston. I live in "West"ern Mass. RIP Mark Goddard "Major West"!
The nice thing about those old computers is that they mostly use a lot of still readily available TTL parts. It makes it easier to keep the old machines running.
31:42 Hmm... Depends on the definition of a Missile. London used salvos of anti-aircraft targeted rockets, that would in the modern world be defined as missiles. On the 1st March 1943, a salvo of targeted rockets was loosed at enemy aircraft near Bethnal Green Station. The unreal noise caused panic in the public resulting in the "Bethnal Green Disaster". Look up "a perfect storm bethnal green" for details.
We had a Tiny BASIC on our Research Machines 380z at school in the 1980s. But it was quite a drastically different tiny BASIC to the one you show here... it wasn't the standard BASIC for the 380z but we needed it to play the classic Star Trek game which was, I think, the only Tiny BASIC program anywhere in the school.
Us too. There was a "proper" basic, but that took over half the memory, and a "tiny" that gave you a lot more space. I wrote an adventure game on it (including a random maze that changed each time you played). Those 380Zs were nice machines.
I enjoyed this video and of course your humor that comes out with each and every one of your videos. I look forward to seeing more ot the Digital Group series.
I'm not really sure to be honest. I know a minimal dg system could have as little as 2K, but it looks like maybe they felt 10K was more useful or the minimum most people were running by then. There were three versions of Tiny BASIC, 10K was the smallest, then 16K, and 26K. Kind of sounds like the opposite of Tiny, and they did have their own Business BASIC as well as MAXI BASIC, so not sure why they'd have a 26K version unless it was just a matter of TB being simple to learn and use.. I note they offered a customized version of TinyBASIC that they claimed could be supplied for any specified memory size, so perhaps they could scale it down as well as up. 10K for example would ignore any memory beyond 10K, same for the others.
That's actually I think what they do. They have a little channel like a box for sawing, and then you lay the tape in it and make a diagonal cut across the parts to be joined. And then you use a tiny piece of tape to hold. Personally I don't see how that doesn't snap again.. but in a case where the tape breaks somewhere well past the leader.. not much else you can do I guess.
I still use cassettes sometimes. I have tons of software on tape for the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum. So when I'm really bored, I'll bring some down to the lounge and load them into the computer then re-save them to the SD card I've fitted to the computer. Lots of fun. LOL.
What a very cool machine, and looks very friendly to use for a mid 70s machine - that loading progress is cool and wouldve helped the press play and pray that other early tape machines had (im thinking of the ZX81). Thanks for the background on TinyBASIC too didnt really know anything about it, I'd actually thought it was a moderm BASIC so wasnt sure id be interested - i was wrong awesome video!
As someone else who's a fan of both retro computing and model railroading, I can't say I'm surprised that you were also into that. I'd be very interested in seeing that more graphical version of Lunar Lander, I did not expect this system to be capable of anything like that.
Good video! The Tiny BASIC users were the original open source movement. I bet today they like Linux. Also, while I'm here, I enjoy BASIC programming, but I don't have the skills, or time, or space for that matter, to run actual hardware. Naturally, I use emulators. If anyone wants to know about a good, free BASIC emulator, PC-Basic emulates GW-Basic and will make files in actually usable formats. You know, .txt, .csv, whatever you want. I'm not affiliated with that project at all. I just thought the other BASIC hobbyists might be interested.
@@TechTimeTraveller Ha ha. It was the same with the ZX81 and the RAM Pack that plugged into the back of the computer to give it 16K. The slightest movement and it would crash. I've put a 32K RAM chip inside mine to stop this problem. LOL.
Hamurabi! I've only just learned about this from the latest Sumerian Game episode of the They Create Worlds podcast, nice to see an example of it from the 70s
Looking at it now that's quite possible. I tried to find a way to quickly convert screen images to text so I could show the listings to others in the know but couldn't find anything that could OCR the text well. Will have to type them out. I feel like there had to be more before that statement.
very interesting video! I have very little knowledge about the first truly domestic computers; However, I read that the Altair 8800's CPU was the Intel 8080 and from what I understand the computer used in this video uses a Zilog Z80! I know that "in theory" the Z80 has a good part of the set of instructions and registers of the 8080 but I would like to know if "in practice" the codes written for the 8080 run directly (without adaptations) on the Z80 or the compatibility is only in the codes in BASIC language? Greetings!
My understanding is they are mostly binary compatible but not 100%. The register and instruction names were changed to avoid copyright issues in the z80 and I've read that affects some programs.
I love Brain Teaser. I don't know if you have ever seen the handheld elecrtonic game from 1978 called Merlin with 6 built in games, but game number 5 is Brain teaser. It's a lot of fun.
@@TechTimeTraveller The only way I can describe it is, you have 9 squares either full or empty in a 3X3 grid. They are numbered 1 to 9 from top left to bottom right. If 1 & 2 are full and 4 & 5 are empty, selecting 1 will make 1 & 2 empty and 4 & 5 full. So it just inverts the contents of the 4 boxes. The same applies for all the corners, selecting 5 affects 2, 4, 5, 6 & 8. Some versions you have to have them all full others all empty. Sorry about all that. LOL. I'm not very good at explaining things. Come to think of it. I've never programed this game on the ZX81. I'll have a go at that. 👍
Always enjoy your videos. Thanks. One question. The LEDs above the keyboard caught my attention. Do you explain what these are in any of your videos? I assume they are a hex representation of the pressed key as they seem to change in rhythm with your key strokes but not sure. I'd like to understand how they work. Thanks.
Thank you. Basically they track the ASCII codes, in binary, and strobe being generated by the keyboard as you type. I guess the original builder put those there as a diagnostic.
the clear clastic leader does more the pull the along, among, many thinks it a strain release for the end the tape, you must of noticed the clear part in much thicker, and that is because when reaches the end when playing, the auto stop, will just snap the magnetic part of the tape? and an seeing is almost the only copy in existence, snapping and stretching the tape more ,bit from it? cannot be a good idea can it? 🙂but I'm looking forward, more video's on the machine?
Quite possibly. Basically I'm just put it together for appearance and to record whatever was on tape to digital. The tapes are not in great condition so it's more of a cosmetic thing I think. If I were using them regularly then yes I'd probably have spliced the leader back in.
These video soundtracks have such a perfect musical mood. It really helps bring out the fun, gentle nature of the channel. Smooth jazz and time travel forever.
Thank you. I do have to give LGR credit for discovering how well jazz works as background music for this genre. I used to get flak for past selections. Background music is a real challenge.. so much that is produced is obnoxious.. jazz is almost the only genre where the artists keep it low key enough to work.
@@TechTimeTraveller part of it is also identifying what is intended as title-card music, what is voiceover music, etc. Proper background music services tell you what each track is intended for, or at least give a mood/pace, and so on. (As I'm sure you've seen.) RUclips's audio library just gives you a giant list with no guidance.
I'm curious about the apparent choice to refer to Home Computers like the Altair and Z80-based Digitial Group computers as "Personal Computers," and if this was deliberate or accidental. If deliberate, would it be accurate to assume that the decision was rooted in recognizing that "Home Computers' largely don't exist, today, and "Personal Computers" are what more people, today, have heard of?
Also, big mood on the shaky hands. A lifetime in computer science has meant a lot of things that involved accelerating the speed of my fingers, with limited precision in many regards.
Yeah i struggle with that because 'personal computer' evolved over time. I've seen the term applied to computers in the early 70s/late 60s that would only have had business applications and only ever been affordable to same; they were personal because they were allocated to and operated by just one person. A 'home computer' on the other hand implies something an average person could potentially afford, but it is also personal. There's a lot of semantics with this stuff and if you're not careful with your wording certain camps get annoyed. :)
I was 17 in 1977 when the TRS-80 came out and did game development for it in Z80 Assenbly and BASIC. I was aware of other hobby computers, but never heard of Digital Group! Thank you! I love this!
TY! Excited to see this. I played the Pet and C64 versions of many of these games as a kid. Used to hang out after school for a few hours at 11 and 12 most days and play on the C64 in our classroom. Played mostly Star Trek with an occasional switch to Lemonade stand; but also Hamurabi for a change of pace. Was excited when I saw its name pop up. I had a copy of it in a pile of DOS shareware disks a friend copied for me in Highschool as well. A few of these games we actually coded in grade 8 Computer Studies on C64s. I distinctly remember Digiguess as one of our assignments. So cool to see a copy of it running on a computer as old as I am (Born in 75). Suggestion to move the repaired tapes to newer cassettes with screws, rather than re-gluing them. Makes them easier to access if you need to repair again, plus fumes from glues can be corrosive. Also; old plastic changes shape over the years, especially the kind used for cassettes in the 70s. This can leave spools spinning tighter and lead to breaks. A bit of solvent on a q-tip can make opening them easier (still concerns over fumes.) I'd 100% replace the felts on 70s cassettes if restoring the original cassette casing for historical reasons, even if they seem relatively decent. Felts/foam guides of the era tend to either disintegrate or can be rougher and scratchier compared to newer ones. They can contribute to more damage.
In the late 75 / 76 I played lander on a main frame from county hall via a teletype. Where you entered thrust ect.The teletype then printed out vairious stats. LOL
In the games that are obviously picking a random number? Looking at the Tiny Basic commands menu @ 16:30, There doesn't appear to have a RND command? So how were random numbers generated?
I think there actually is an random function. From line 40 of the Russian roulette game, it goes like so: 00040 IF RN>8333 GOTO 70 00045 IF N>10 GOTO 80 00050 PR "- CLICK -" 00060 PR $GOTO 30 00070 PR " BANG!!!! YOU'RE DEAD! " 00071 PR " CONDOLENCES WILL BE SENT TO"$PR " YOUR RELATIVES. " 00072 PR $PR$PR$PR" NEXT VICTUM..."$GOTO20 00080 PR "YOU WIN!!!" I think the R before N variable randomizes it. I'll have to test and find out.
I just OCRed the document for digital group Tiny BASIC. I was right: "There is one general function available under TBX-TVCOS. This is the function which generates a random number. The random number function is involked by inserting the letters RN wherever a variable might normally occur in an expression. Whenever RN is encountered, the random number generator generates a number in the range 0(=RN
@@TechTimeTraveller Ahh, I see. Thank you for clearing that up Also I absolutely love the idea that you can archive old decaying cassette tapes for posterity sake, by saving the audio to a wav file. I'm going to try that with my old TRS-80 cassettte (which still work, but who knows for how long).
I know this isn't in the spirit of the vintage hardware (which is awesome,) but are these programs preserved somewhere? I wrote my own minimalist Z-80 emulator and getting tiny basic and these programs to run on it would be a thrill (and probably not all that hard)
I was trying to figure out an efficient way to print off the listings. I don't have a way yet to interface a printer with the dg machine. I tried OCRing screen caps of the listings but it didn't work real well. I may just type them out soon but some are quite long. Still hoping there's a simpler way.
@@TechTimeTraveller I've had good luck capturing serial output from Minicom on a PC (just LST of the programs), but I don't know if the machine has a standard RS-232 compatible interface.
Or even just point the camera right at the screen and run LST. The video output seems pretty crisp. Might OCR well. (I'm not suggesting you go through the pain of doing such an OCR, but maybe one of us can. 😃
What do you mean with 'as long as we can keep these old machines alive'? My old computer is an Elf, and elves are immortal. By the way, it also had a Tiny BASIC. Similar, but not identical to this one. But it was also based on a virtual machine for portability, which of course makes the whole thing yet a bit slower.
There's a talk Bil Herd gave at a recent VCF festival which basically said every IC, no matter how well stored or cared for, will die eventually. That's what I was going off of, although I'm amazed at how long stuff has lasted thus far. I suppose workarounds will continue to be found but Bil says it's a sure thing all the original components will be toast at some point. Re: Tiny BASIC.. I just got two eproms and a listing of that with a Super ELF + expansion board I purchased.
@@TechTimeTraveller A good purchase. Is that your first contact with an Elf? If so, then you should know that the 1802 processor and the computers built around it had a habit of doing the at the time usual things in a slightly unusual way. For example, it did not use a UART for serial communication. The processor did that itself. The only other hardware involved were a few discrete parts to level shift the serial signals from and to RS232 voltage levels. If that option is not installed on your expansion board, you may want to do that. Its just a handful of transistors, capacitors and resistors. However, your power supply will also have to provide a negative voltage for that to work. These days we usually just use a MAX232 level shifting IC, which does not require that negative voltage from the power supply.
@CDP1861 I actually have 4 ELFs.. an original hand-built one from 1977 with the owners design drawings and notes, a Quest ELF, a Netronics ELF II and now the Super ELF. I wanted one of each classic ELF as I am working on a documentary video about the ELF and wanted to show each of the 'classic' variations. In terms of programming I'm a total novice though. I've done the basic demo programs but the Super ELF will be the first time I do some assembly (the expansion board has sockets but is empty).
@@TechTimeTraveller You could already do quite a bit in the original 256 bytes RAM of an unexpanded Elf. I would suggest that you type in the small 'Enterprise' demo to see if the CDP1861 is working. A small wonder at a time when pixel graphics required graphics cards that could easily cost more than the Elf itself, or you had simpler hardware that required you to 'race the electron beam'. In a wy, the CDP1861 did just that, but in a way that it was automated by interrupts and DMA. You did not have to pay any attention to it in your code. Possibly a good subject for your video. And the processor? You have not written any code for it? Then you are in for an experience. The processor has hardly any dedicated registers. Instead, you have 16 16 bit registers which you can use in any way you see fit. You even get to choose which ones currently are the proram counter or the stack pointer. Something like a RISC processor, a while before that term was even invented. In my opinion the friendliest processor you will ever see and in many ways more of a glimpse of the future than any of the other 8 bit processors of the time. As to your memory problem: You should easily be able to piggyback a single 62256 memory somewhere onto the expansion board. Address it at 0000. All you then would have to watch out for is that your ROMs and the original 256 bytes stay out of the area 0000-7FFF. I honestly don't remember how the super Elf exactly relocated the original 256 byte RAM above the expansion RAM. Or you could simply remove them. What's not installed must not be taken care of.
old systems is fun, both to look back how good it was in the old days and also to see how much it have been improved over the years. The old hardware was much more able than you would think. The flickering is something you can get used to but it was the best solution of the time to display a picture on the screen.
It's been a while! I'm trying not to kill my love for the hobby via RUclips demands, so I took my time enjoying this system while also filming it. I also filmed my newly acquired Mindset II and some other stuff in depth, so hopefully the resulting videos will come out a little faster. I'm working on finding more dg software for another round with my z80 in the future. Also, I made a commemorative dg t-shirt which is linked above for those interested. And again, I did my best to murder the 15khz CRT whine that annoys younger ears. I can't hear or see it on my spectrum analyzer so hopefully we're good there. Enjoy!
ooh nice, another documentary! these are always fun to watch! thanks!!!
Makes sense.
that something that puts me of some RUclips channels, they get some viewers, and next thing there nocking out video every 10 minutes, the very Quality some what subjective attribute that may be understood differently by different people just go out the widow, just to chase views, on there channel?
As the author (well, translator really) of the 68000 version of Tiny BASIC, I approve this video. Even though I haven't had time to watch it yet! 😆
Ah, Biorhythms. I remember it well. Back in the early 80s you'd still find program listings for this and I remember typing one in and me and my friend were horrified to see that apparently we were all going flatline in the year 2000.
The joys of working with two digit dates...
You had a Y2K bug lol
Even taking into account the character resolution is ~32×16, the pixel resolution of whatever they're using to generate the display is surprisingly high!
18:05 "ERR 12 65535" - The error message pops up because the last command is not an END command. In Tiny Basic this is obligatory.
Correct, yes. I think I accidentally cut out some footage though where I had the end statement and it still gave error 12. Right in that sequence it was getting progressively less stable. Reseating and rebooting seemed to clear it.
Good point!
A car parts store will sell plastic pry tools for auto body repair. I've found them useful for everything from opening boxes, prying apart non-car bits, and even scraping flat surfaces without risk of damaging surfaces or cutting myself. I'm sure others will have even better ideas but putting that out to assist. Great video!
I'll have to look into those. Various youtubers were using xacto blades and they also had this splicer tool you lay the tape in and do a diagonal cut with. I never knew actual cassette repair tools existed!
Kinda unrelated but I tried finding one of those in a size that could pry open an iPod mini, but gave up. Months later for unrelated reasons I ordered a screwdriver bit-set roll pack and waddya know it came with a plastic pry bar inside. I was not impressed lol
Dang! I was hoping to see my favorite basic game: Zork... Although that's basically an 80's game that loaded off a 5 ¼" floppy and registered various inputs such as N,S,E,W for directions and other simple commands like"look at" or "get (object). All text based responses on a green screen and I remember buying graph paper to create my own personal map of the world. No save options back in those days. Still, it was good for hours of fun on my old IBM XT clone. 🖥️
If you noticed the descriptions of each tape in the sales flyer at 2:40 the games are almost all direct conversions from 101 BASIC Computer Games. Presumably this is the David Ahl book which can be found on the Web. It contains all the programs you tried and comes with detailed instructions for each of them.
I missed that! Thanks! I didn't think to look as I wasn't sure how much digital group might have changed things or how the 'licencing' worked, if any.
I loved that book. I had the Micro-Computer Edition, the yellow cover and a guy with his arm on a robot's shoulders. I had a C64 as a kid in the mid 80's. I was in the talented and gifted program in my school district and its library had this book. I borrowed the book over the summer one year. Unfortunately the talented and gifted program ended after that year, likely due to funding, and I wasn't ever able to return the book. I still have it in my collection. The game Hammurabi (which we all pronounced ham-uh-robby) was a favorite in my class. It's hard to be a Babylonian king. And yeah, as a kid, the Russian Roulette game baffled me. I totally didn't get it. There's even a drawing adjacent to the listing in the book of a robot tethered to a computer case with a wire and the robot is pointing a gun at the case. This book, along with the C64 programming manual, taught me to program as a kid and that's what pays my bills today.
Thanks for the history lesson. I'm a huge fan of Tiny Windows. I had no idea Tiny Basic was a thing.
Always appreciate your comments/thoughts!
I wish s-100 stuff wasn't so expensive, been looking for a basic machine to mess with even if I have to use my PET or model III as a terminal to use it but when a IMSAI 8080 backplane goes for $200 on ebay and any other boards are north of $300 it kind of hurts.
Yeah IMSAI stuff on particular is hot.. lot of people my age with money and memories of Wargames. I don't think this can go on forever though.
Oh yes cheap glued cassettes without screws - but I was young and needed the money!😋
I still have my 1970s Dr Dobbs collection, together with my own annotations where I'd ported code like Palo Alto Tiny Basic onto my own hardware, and Steve Wosniak's floating point routines. These were great times, when you could still know, understand, and maintain everything from a basic program to component level.
did you find out what the other files on the tape were?
Oof.. I forgot to mention that. I tried loading them various ways but they did not appear to be Tiny BASIC related. I'm not really sure what they are. They don't load into any other BASIC I have and don't appear to be standalone programs either.
Brain Teaser would be that when you pick a position 1-9 [square is (1,2,3)(4,5,6)(7,8,9) ] then it will flip that square AND its left, right, above and below squares. So 5 would flip 2,4,5,6,8, 8 would flip 8,7,8,9 and 1 would flip 1,2,4 - and you want to flip all the positions to 1 (probably)
It looks like if you ignore the END command then Tiny BASIC continues to look through the buffer and when it gets to what it thinks is line 65535 it finds invalid code.
Chomp is also documented in your copy of David Aho's Basic Computer Games. There's also a version of checkers, which I would expect to be similar to the one on on your tape. I know, because I have a copy of the same book, bought new at Radio Shack back in the day. :)
New TTT just dropped. Guess I'm not doing any work for the next little while haha!
4:15 thieves even though he didn't steal anything
Legally acquired original paper tape, and presumably: purchased the paper he used to make copies, and was authorized to use the copier (or owned) - it's always amusing to watch people try and explain how copying and duplication are theft in any capacity - the only friend they have is the law, but logic dictates no theft has occurred. Digital piracy is a myth (and logical fallacy).
I've always wondered whether you could singi basic code turned into lyrics over music to create a song that when run gave an answer. Bill Gates is a snake. Thats why i use Linux and game on PlayStation.
You will love the 21st century eZ80 BBC Basic on the Agon Light.
Digiguess is like wordle, but for numbers. Love seeing collections of old games like this. As you said it's a window into the time they came from.
Why not use a sacrificial cassette case with screws to stop using glue?
I kinda the whole "let's preserve the original as it was", but ... CA glue? Ufff!
I just wanted to preserve the original dg shells. It was very tempting to switch to screws but I figured I was digitizing these and probably wouldn't use them much going forward.. so might as well leave appearance correct.
I had as my first computer, the TI 99 4A, 16K color. Hooked up to a color tv, it's own cassette recorder, all cables. Books. A Christmas gift from Mom, 1983. I took a "Computer Concepts" course and it had BASIC. The satellite center (nearby Pathfinder Regional Vocational H.S.) with my then, maternal grandmother, the high school had an IBM 360, blue. BASIC on both systems. I have to add that my entree into robots/computers was re-runs of "Lost In Space" 1965-68 version, beginning in 1978. WLVI(then) in Boston. I live in "West"ern Mass. RIP Mark Goddard "Major West"!
The nice thing about those old computers is that they mostly use a lot of still readily available TTL parts. It makes it easier to keep the old machines running.
Yeah it's the early-80s and onwards with the unobtanium ASICs where it gets tricky!
31:42 Hmm... Depends on the definition of a Missile. London used salvos of anti-aircraft targeted rockets, that would in the modern world be defined as missiles. On the 1st March 1943, a salvo of targeted rockets was loosed at enemy aircraft near Bethnal Green Station. The unreal noise caused panic in the public resulting in the "Bethnal Green Disaster". Look up "a perfect storm bethnal green" for details.
Fun fact, this computer and the Commodore 128 both run their z80s at 2mhz.. Which is why CPM on the 128 was bad....
IIRC, when a INPUT command is used with more than one variable separated by comma, the user should type the respectove values also separated by comma?
I think so.. it was just a bit confusing the way they presented it.
We had a Tiny BASIC on our Research Machines 380z at school in the 1980s. But it was quite a drastically different tiny BASIC to the one you show here... it wasn't the standard BASIC for the 380z but we needed it to play the classic Star Trek game which was, I think, the only Tiny BASIC program anywhere in the school.
Us too. There was a "proper" basic, but that took over half the memory, and a "tiny" that gave you a lot more space. I wrote an adventure game on it (including a random maze that changed each time you played). Those 380Zs were nice machines.
@@nickatty462best machine code debugger I've ever used... If I could have had Acorn's assembler on the same machine... that would have been heaven.
In British slang, "Chuck out" means "throw away" - may fit?
Maybe. It's possible they literally just ripped these programs straight off from other programmers/magazines. Maybe the programmer was British?
I enjoyed this video and of course your humor that comes out with each and every one of your videos. I look forward to seeing more ot the Digital Group series.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video, Brad! Tiny Basic 10K?? I thought it fit fine in 4K. Was it all the additions that they made for that system that made it bigger?
I'm not really sure to be honest. I know a minimal dg system could have as little as 2K, but it looks like maybe they felt 10K was more useful or the minimum most people were running by then. There were three versions of Tiny BASIC, 10K was the smallest, then 16K, and 26K. Kind of sounds like the opposite of Tiny, and they did have their own Business BASIC as well as MAXI BASIC, so not sure why they'd have a 26K version unless it was just a matter of TB being simple to learn and use.. I note they offered a customized version of TinyBASIC that they claimed could be supplied for any specified memory size, so perhaps they could scale it down as well as up. 10K for example would ignore any memory beyond 10K, same for the others.
Probably not the proper way but we always just used a bit of scotch tape to splice tapes!
That's actually I think what they do. They have a little channel like a box for sawing, and then you lay the tape in it and make a diagonal cut across the parts to be joined. And then you use a tiny piece of tape to hold. Personally I don't see how that doesn't snap again.. but in a case where the tape breaks somewhere well past the leader.. not much else you can do I guess.
I really like this kind of videos, really entertaining and informative.
And yet it is presently bombing the algorithm lol. RUclips is so mean sometimes. :)
tiny basic could have been just straight up assembler, whenever DOS has its first EDIT.exe, and not the number lines editors
I still use cassettes sometimes. I have tons of software on tape for the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum. So when I'm really bored, I'll bring some down to the lounge and load them into the computer then re-save them to the SD card I've fitted to the computer. Lots of fun. LOL.
I wonder how long these tapes can hold out. When I was younger I remember hearing 50 years as the time frame anything tape based was going to be gone.
@@TechTimeTraveller Tape degredation is a worry. Especially if the tape stock was cheap to begin with.
What a very cool machine, and looks very friendly to use for a mid 70s machine - that loading progress is cool and wouldve helped the press play and pray that other early tape machines had (im thinking of the ZX81). Thanks for the background on TinyBASIC too didnt really know anything about it, I'd actually thought it was a moderm BASIC so wasnt sure id be interested - i was wrong awesome video!
As someone else who's a fan of both retro computing and model railroading, I can't say I'm surprised that you were also into that. I'd be very interested in seeing that more graphical version of Lunar Lander, I did not expect this system to be capable of anything like that.
Would like a “structured walk-through” of tiny BASIC source code 👨💻. The VM interpreted version preferably. 😊
I came for the tiny basic but stayed for the smooth jazz.
Good video! The Tiny BASIC users were the original open source movement. I bet today they like Linux. Also, while I'm here, I enjoy BASIC programming, but I don't have the skills, or time, or space for that matter, to run actual hardware. Naturally, I use emulators. If anyone wants to know about a good, free BASIC emulator, PC-Basic emulates GW-Basic and will make files in actually usable formats. You know, .txt, .csv, whatever you want. I'm not affiliated with that project at all. I just thought the other BASIC hobbyists might be interested.
6:09 - "...use an intermediate language for easy *cording* (?) - Do you mean 'porting' or 'coding' (or both) ?
Porting. I may have mispronounced there.
@@TechTimeTraveller Ah. Thanks :)
What a great computer. I'd love to do some programing on it. LOL.
It's great if you can keep it stable lol
@@TechTimeTraveller Ha ha. It was the same with the ZX81 and the RAM Pack that plugged into the back of the computer to give it 16K. The slightest movement and it would crash. I've put a 32K RAM chip inside mine to stop this problem. LOL.
I still like your videos, even though you don't like Star Trek. I like your background music too.
I'm not sure how exactly to communicate this in text, but you pronounce Hammurabi as Ha-moo-rah-bee
Just the history geek in me coming out
Hamurabi! I've only just learned about this from the latest Sumerian Game episode of the They Create Worlds podcast, nice to see an example of it from the 70s
Reminds me of loading from cassette on my Sinclair ZX-81.
Yes to be outdone, Seagate introduced the HD T@ six months later, with about the same level of visibility.
Solitaire Russian Roulette... 2 player is bad enough, not much to this one.
Gee, I think that the Russian Roulette one was a good attempt at multiplayer gaming 😂
I'm also a geek who doesn't care for the whole StarTrekWars thing.
Was Chomp missing a NXT I at the start of that 580 line perhaps? Looks like it's setting up the game array from 540-580
Looking at it now that's quite possible. I tried to find a way to quickly convert screen images to text so I could show the listings to others in the know but couldn't find anything that could OCR the text well. Will have to type them out. I feel like there had to be more before that statement.
32:00 they had the v2 missiles but they were used for bombing long distance targets. my great aunts kitchen was blown up by one of them
Oh my God, Tiny Basic would bore me to tears !!!
Star Trek rules!!!
But it's okay - I still love your videos!
Thanks for sharing your experience
changing line 5, when the error message says it's line 20, doesn't make too much sense, does it
"Guess a number?", 32? "wrong! Guess again!"
no amount of nostalgia could get me to go back to typing in programs and trying to save and load them from cassette tapes.
very interesting video! I have very little knowledge about the first truly domestic computers; However, I read that the Altair 8800's CPU was the Intel 8080 and from what I understand the computer used in this video uses a Zilog Z80! I know that "in theory" the Z80 has a good part of the set of instructions and registers of the 8080 but I would like to know if "in practice" the codes written for the 8080 run directly (without adaptations) on the Z80 or the compatibility is only in the codes in BASIC language? Greetings!
My understanding is they are mostly binary compatible but not 100%. The register and instruction names were changed to avoid copyright issues in the z80 and I've read that affects some programs.
I love Brain Teaser. I don't know if you have ever seen the handheld elecrtonic game from 1978 called Merlin with 6 built in games, but game number 5 is Brain teaser. It's a lot of fun.
Oh man.. I vaguely remember Merlin. And now the brain teaser also. I just couldn't remember what the goal was..
@@TechTimeTraveller The only way I can describe it is, you have 9 squares either full or empty in a 3X3 grid. They are numbered 1 to 9 from top left to bottom right. If 1 & 2 are full and 4 & 5 are empty, selecting 1 will make 1 & 2 empty and 4 & 5 full. So it just inverts the contents of the 4 boxes. The same applies for all the corners, selecting 5 affects 2, 4, 5, 6 & 8. Some versions you have to have them all full others all empty.
Sorry about all that. LOL. I'm not very good at explaining things.
Come to think of it. I've never programed this game on the ZX81. I'll have a go at that. 👍
Yay, I've managed to program the game and it's only 4.32K LOL.
Those poor Altair suckers lmao.
Always enjoy your videos. Thanks. One question. The LEDs above the keyboard caught my attention. Do you explain what these are in any of your videos? I assume they are a hex representation of the pressed key as they seem to change in rhythm with your key strokes but not sure. I'd like to understand how they work. Thanks.
Thank you. Basically they track the ASCII codes, in binary, and strobe being generated by the keyboard as you type. I guess the original builder put those there as a diagnostic.
Thanks to take the pain on trying this ugly games.
the clear clastic leader does more the pull the along, among, many thinks it a strain release for the end the tape, you must of noticed the clear part in much thicker, and that is because when reaches the end when playing, the auto stop, will just snap the magnetic part of the tape? and an seeing is almost the only copy in existence, snapping and stretching the tape more ,bit from it? cannot be a good idea can it? 🙂but I'm looking forward, more video's on the machine?
Quite possibly. Basically I'm just put it together for appearance and to record whatever was on tape to digital. The tapes are not in great condition so it's more of a cosmetic thing I think. If I were using them regularly then yes I'd probably have spliced the leader back in.
why dont we save all data as sound that seems insanely useful
40 years of ai evolution and it is still awful
These video soundtracks have such a perfect musical mood. It really helps bring out the fun, gentle nature of the channel. Smooth jazz and time travel forever.
Thank you. I do have to give LGR credit for discovering how well jazz works as background music for this genre. I used to get flak for past selections. Background music is a real challenge.. so much that is produced is obnoxious.. jazz is almost the only genre where the artists keep it low key enough to work.
@@TechTimeTraveller part of it is also identifying what is intended as title-card music, what is voiceover music, etc.
Proper background music services tell you what each track is intended for, or at least give a mood/pace, and so on. (As I'm sure you've seen.) RUclips's audio library just gives you a giant list with no guidance.
I'm curious about the apparent choice to refer to Home Computers like the Altair and Z80-based Digitial Group computers as "Personal Computers," and if this was deliberate or accidental. If deliberate, would it be accurate to assume that the decision was rooted in recognizing that "Home Computers' largely don't exist, today, and "Personal Computers" are what more people, today, have heard of?
Also, big mood on the shaky hands. A lifetime in computer science has meant a lot of things that involved accelerating the speed of my fingers, with limited precision in many regards.
Yeah i struggle with that because 'personal computer' evolved over time. I've seen the term applied to computers in the early 70s/late 60s that would only have had business applications and only ever been affordable to same; they were personal because they were allocated to and operated by just one person. A 'home computer' on the other hand implies something an average person could potentially afford, but it is also personal. There's a lot of semantics with this stuff and if you're not careful with your wording certain camps get annoyed. :)
Notification Squad! :D
you are only in your 40s but you make it sound like you are in your 80s every time you bring up your age for no reason
I'm almost 50.. and believe me when you get there you start feeling it.
Thank you so much for sharing this!
Hey Brad, any updates on your arcade machine project?
Slowly collecting parts. I am trying to learn safe CRT discharge procedures. It's a slow process getting comfortable with that.
I was 17 in 1977 when the TRS-80 came out and did game development for it in Z80 Assenbly and BASIC. I was aware of other hobby computers, but never heard of Digital Group! Thank you! I love this!
Music not required.
Bow chicka wow wow.
TY! Excited to see this.
I played the Pet and C64 versions of many of these games as a kid. Used to hang out after school for a few hours at 11 and 12 most days and play on the C64 in our classroom. Played mostly Star Trek with an occasional switch to Lemonade stand; but also Hamurabi for a change of pace. Was excited when I saw its name pop up. I had a copy of it in a pile of DOS shareware disks a friend copied for me in Highschool as well.
A few of these games we actually coded in grade 8 Computer Studies on C64s. I distinctly remember Digiguess as one of our assignments. So cool to see a copy of it running on a computer as old as I am (Born in 75).
Suggestion to move the repaired tapes to newer cassettes with screws, rather than re-gluing them. Makes them easier to access if you need to repair again, plus fumes from glues can be corrosive. Also; old plastic changes shape over the years, especially the kind used for cassettes in the 70s. This can leave spools spinning tighter and lead to breaks. A bit of solvent on a q-tip can make opening them easier (still concerns over fumes.) I'd 100% replace the felts on 70s cassettes if restoring the original cassette casing for historical reasons, even if they seem relatively decent. Felts/foam guides of the era tend to either disintegrate or can be rougher and scratchier compared to newer ones. They can contribute to more damage.
looky-loo, looky-loo!
In the late 75 / 76 I played lander on a main frame from county hall via a teletype. Where you entered thrust ect.The teletype then printed out vairious stats. LOL
The noise and vibration of the teletype must have added to the realism haha
Sure did LOL very high-tech.
@@TechTimeTraveller
In the games that are obviously picking a random number? Looking at the Tiny Basic commands menu @ 16:30, There doesn't appear to have a RND command? So how were random numbers generated?
I think there actually is an random function. From line 40 of the Russian roulette game, it goes like so:
00040 IF RN>8333 GOTO 70
00045 IF N>10 GOTO 80
00050 PR "- CLICK -"
00060 PR $GOTO 30
00070 PR " BANG!!!! YOU'RE DEAD! "
00071 PR " CONDOLENCES WILL BE SENT TO"$PR " YOUR RELATIVES. "
00072 PR $PR$PR$PR" NEXT VICTUM..."$GOTO20
00080 PR "YOU WIN!!!"
I think the R before N variable randomizes it. I'll have to test and find out.
I just OCRed the document for digital group Tiny BASIC. I was right:
"There is one general function available under TBX-TVCOS. This is the
function which generates a random number. The random number function is
involked by inserting the letters RN wherever a variable might normally
occur in an expression. Whenever RN is encountered, the random number generator
generates a number in the range 0(=RN
@@TechTimeTraveller Ahh, I see. Thank you for clearing that up Also I absolutely love the idea that you can archive old decaying cassette tapes for posterity sake, by saving the audio to a wav file.
I'm going to try that with my old TRS-80 cassettte (which still work, but who knows for how long).
HAM UR (or like Hammer) ABI ("ah-Bee")
Much obliged!
I know this isn't in the spirit of the vintage hardware (which is awesome,) but are these programs preserved somewhere? I wrote my own minimalist Z-80 emulator and getting tiny basic and these programs to run on it would be a thrill (and probably not all that hard)
I was trying to figure out an efficient way to print off the listings. I don't have a way yet to interface a printer with the dg machine. I tried OCRing screen caps of the listings but it didn't work real well. I may just type them out soon but some are quite long. Still hoping there's a simpler way.
@@TechTimeTraveller I've had good luck capturing serial output from Minicom on a PC (just LST of the programs), but I don't know if the machine has a standard RS-232 compatible interface.
Or even just point the camera right at the screen and run LST. The video output seems pretty crisp. Might OCR well. (I'm not suggesting you go through the pain of doing such an OCR, but maybe one of us can. 😃
My sister was really good at Hamurabi, (Ham-oo-ra-be), she would always last the full ten years.
I made it 2 years. Pretty much straight dive no matter what I did!
@@TechTimeTraveller You did better than I ever did. I always got kicked out of the kingdom after 1 year. LOL
What do you mean with 'as long as we can keep these old machines alive'? My old computer is an Elf, and elves are immortal. By the way, it also had a Tiny BASIC. Similar, but not identical to this one. But it was also based on a virtual machine for portability, which of course makes the whole thing yet a bit slower.
There's a talk Bil Herd gave at a recent VCF festival which basically said every IC, no matter how well stored or cared for, will die eventually. That's what I was going off of, although I'm amazed at how long stuff has lasted thus far. I suppose workarounds will continue to be found but Bil says it's a sure thing all the original components will be toast at some point. Re: Tiny BASIC.. I just got two eproms and a listing of that with a Super ELF + expansion board I purchased.
@@TechTimeTraveller A good purchase. Is that your first contact with an Elf? If so, then you should know that the 1802 processor and the computers built around it had a habit of doing the at the time usual things in a slightly unusual way. For example, it did not use a UART for serial communication. The processor did that itself. The only other hardware involved were a few discrete parts to level shift the serial signals from and to RS232 voltage levels. If that option is not installed on your expansion board, you may want to do that. Its just a handful of transistors, capacitors and resistors. However, your power supply will also have to provide a negative voltage for that to work. These days we usually just use a MAX232 level shifting IC, which does not require that negative voltage from the power supply.
@CDP1861 I actually have 4 ELFs.. an original hand-built one from 1977 with the owners design drawings and notes, a Quest ELF, a Netronics ELF II and now the Super ELF. I wanted one of each classic ELF as I am working on a documentary video about the ELF and wanted to show each of the 'classic' variations. In terms of programming I'm a total novice though. I've done the basic demo programs but the Super ELF will be the first time I do some assembly (the expansion board has sockets but is empty).
@@TechTimeTraveller You could already do quite a bit in the original 256 bytes RAM of an unexpanded Elf. I would suggest that you type in the small 'Enterprise' demo to see if the CDP1861 is working. A small wonder at a time when pixel graphics required graphics cards that could easily cost more than the Elf itself, or you had simpler hardware that required you to 'race the electron beam'. In a wy, the CDP1861 did just that, but in a way that it was automated by interrupts and DMA. You did not have to pay any attention to it in your code. Possibly a good subject for your video.
And the processor? You have not written any code for it? Then you are in for an experience. The processor has hardly any dedicated registers. Instead, you have 16 16 bit registers which you can use in any way you see fit. You even get to choose which ones currently are the proram counter or the stack pointer. Something like a RISC processor, a while before that term was even invented. In my opinion the friendliest processor you will ever see and in many ways more of a glimpse of the future than any of the other 8 bit processors of the time.
As to your memory problem: You should easily be able to piggyback a single 62256 memory somewhere onto the expansion board. Address it at 0000. All you then would have to watch out for is that your ROMs and the original 256 bytes stay out of the area 0000-7FFF. I honestly don't remember how the super Elf exactly relocated the original 256 byte RAM above the expansion RAM. Or you could simply remove them. What's not installed must not be taken care of.
old systems is fun, both to look back how good it was in the old days and also to see how much it have been improved over the years. The old hardware was much more able than you would think.
The flickering is something you can get used to but it was the best solution of the time to display a picture on the screen.
pinata?
Nice!
The keyboard for this thing is just incredible .
Its not AI its an algorithm
We need people to write software for a living. Let's please stop pretending it's not worth as much as hardware.
The letter back to Gates basic-ally (hah!) blames him for not having a EULA and DRM.
But please tell me how you can write all your own software and/or convince someone else to do it for free in their spare time.
Yea but a lot of it is overprized. why should photoshop cost more than 100$ .