Broken Computer Games is a generated book for NaNoGenMo2022 (National Novel Generation Month).

"Broken" is based on the real book Basic Computer Games by David Ahl. That book was published by Dave Ahl in 1978, and he put it into the public domain in 2022. Basic Computer Games was the first computer book to sell one million copies, and taught a generation of budding programers how to program in the BASIC language.

This little python script randomly selects two of the Basic computer games and mashes them up by choosing a few lines of code from each program. I generated hundreds of these, then ran the programs in pybasic.

for i in {001..500}; do python3 mashup.py > program$i.bas ; echo "load program$i\nrun\n2\n3\n4\nexit\n" \
| python3 pybasic/interpreter.py | tail +10 | sed 's/^.*###/###/' | grep -v "Program read from file" \
> output/output$i.txt ; echo "----" ; done

I chose the programs with the most interesting output. Finially, I used Text to PDF to generate the PDF.

Read Broken Computer Games

More info about this project at NaNoGenMo

Read the real BASIC Computer Games

Code from the book came from vintage-basic.net

Dot Matrix Font

What Font Is? identified fonts for the cover

which are FattiPattiFLF

and OptiPlanet-Light

and I didn't end up using Trumania EEN but you know you want to