tapes

The tape library

103 listings in the original Microsoft BASIC — every program in the book this machine can run. They are the COLLECTED shelf in the tape box, and ten of them are also the acceptance test.

Completeness becomes a number — how many of the ten run — rather than a feeling.

Each was screened twice: typed in a line at a time, then run against canned answers. Only listings that load without a syntax error and then play are here. One of the 104 in the source repository is left out — king_variable_update.bas, which is a renamed copy rather than a listing.

index.js records each tape's name, line count and length, and test/tapes.test.js checks those numbers against the files. A stale count there would mis-state how long a tape takes to read, which is the one number in the interface anybody acts on.

Where they came from

github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games, which carries the listings from David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games (Creative Computing, 1978).

Licensing — this was checked, and it is settled

CLAUDE.md §3 recorded this as UNVERIFIED, with a fallback plan if the listings turned out not to be redistributable. They are.

On 15 June 2022 David Ahl formally placed his work in the public domain:

"This is a public notice that I am formally placing everything that I have written or edited into the Public Domain…"

He edited BASIC Computer Games, so it is covered. Three things corroborate it:

• the Internet Archive marks the books CC Public Domain Mark 1.0, citing that declaration explicitly in the item metadata;
• coding-horror/basic-computer-games ships the original .bas listings under the Unlicense, a public-domain dedication;
• the declaration was reported at the time by Adafruit, AtariAge and others, and has stood unchallenged since.

One caveat, stated rather than hidden. The declaration was made in a Facebook post. Nobody working on this repository has seen that post; the chain is post → Ira Goldklang → Adafruit → Internet Archive metadata. The evidence is strong enough to rely on, but it is second hand.

Do not source these from atariarchives.org. That site hosts the same book under a much older arrangement and asks that it not be mirrored or copied. That request predates the 2022 declaration and is the site's own condition, not Ahl's current position — but there is no reason to argue with it when the Internet Archive and GitHub copies carry explicit public-domain terms.

What is missing

HUNT THE WUMPUS. It is one of the ten in CLAUDE.md and it is not in the coding-horror repository, which carries 100 games but not that one. The score is therefore out of nine until a listing is found somewhere else.

lem.bas, lunar.bas and rocket.bas are the three variants that share the LUNAR / ROCKET slot, so eleven files cover nine of the ten acceptance programs.