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Lunar Landing Anniversary - LEM2.BAS

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mbbrutman

Associate Cat Herder
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In honor of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing I dug this beauty out of the archives. Download it from here (http://www.brutman.com/lem2.bas) and here is a screenshot:

lem.jpg


This runs on IBMs and compatibles with built-in BASIC or GWBASIC.


Enjoy,
Mike
 
Yes, strangely I found myself playing Lunar Lander on the TRS-80 Model 1 the other day?

Must be the significance of the date.

In New Zealand the Eagle touched down at about 8.15am on the 21st July. I was 11. We normally should have been on our bikes and riding off to school by then, but my mother let us kids stay home and listen to the radio until we heard those famous words "Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed". Then she drove us to school so we wouldn't be late.

At about 2.50pm or so that afternoon, we were in school when Armstrong first set foot on the moon. There was no live TV of this in NZ but we had our school radio tuned in and the whole class heard the Neil Armstong speak those other famous words when he stepped out of the Lunar module. What a moment that was! Then we saw the grainy images on the National news that night.

It really was an event that united the world.

Tez
 
mbbrutman said:
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing I dug this beauty out of the archives. Download it from here (http://www.brutman.com/lem2.bas)
Click to expand...

Mike, I would like to run this program, but I am not offered the option of downloading it as a BASIC file. I am shown the source listing which I assume is in ASCII. Do I need to somehow 'tokenize' the file before I can LOAD it? It has been a while since I did anything with GWBASIC.
 
dave_m said:
Mike, I would like to run this program, but I am not offered the option of downloading it as a BASIC file. I am shown the source listing which I assume is in ASCII. Do I need to somehow 'tokenize' the file before I can LOAD it?
Click to expand...

BASICA/GWBASIC will load ASCII programs fine. Just cut and paste the listing into Notepad and save it with a BAS extension.
 
Seems to me that is the listing of the program, for BASIC or GWBASIC. All you have to do to run that on a vintage computer is save the .BAS instead of opening, put it on a floppy, and load it whichever computer. To run it from a modern one, same basic deal(no pun intended), but all you have to do is save it to a folder and run it with a BASIC interpreter.

--Ryan
Dang, you beat me to it Fallo.
 
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Wasn't there a PLATO version of LEM? For that matter, wasn't there a version of the same game that ran on the CDC 6600 operator's console--it could have been on the CE's MACE deadstart tape?
 
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what's the history of this game? is it from a book of basic programs?
As a PC/DOS games collector, I would love to know the year this was released and the author - i'll add it to the archive.

I have a version of this called "out on a LEM" done in 1984, which uses some of the same source code, so this has to be a bit earlier than the copy I have.
 
The game is very old--possibly has its roots in the early 70's--much older than even the 1979 Atari "Lunar Lander" video game. I'll swear that I played it on a CDC 6600, whiling away the time while my database project ran. What else are you going to do at 3:00 AM sitting in front of a machine? Watch the tapes spin? (There was also BAT (baseball) and CHESS).
 
You know, I was scanning through the source code trying to find out the origin. The name 'Out on a LEM' was in my mind when I was looking through my files trying to find the game.

I probably started with 'Out on a LEM' and reformatted the code and/or fixed some bugs. Back 20 years ago I was hit and miss about keeping comments in the code - the BASIC interpreter has to skip past them at run time, so not realizing the value of the comments (or structured code in general) I often purged comments. (Every byte counts.) Looking back it's unfortunate ..

Can you email me the original 'Out on a LEM' so I can figure out what I did?
 
speed issue

speed issue

I've loaded the basic program into a 133MHz DOS laptop running gwbasic and it runs but the timing is way off. I played around with the variable called 'factor' and added a FOR/NEXT NOP delay in the main loop at line 865, but can't seem to get the proper operation. The LEM races across the screen in a second.

The game I remember seemed to have a larger LEM and it might have been on a PET.
 
dave_m said:
I've loaded the basic program into a 133MHz DOS laptop running gwbasic and it runs but the timing is way off. I played around with the variable called 'factor' and added a FOR/NEXT NOP delay in the main loop at line 865, but can't seem to get the proper operation. The LEM races across the screen in a second.
Click to expand...

FOR...NEXT delays are useless except on 8088s. On anything faster, you'd use the TIMER function. As an example, to create a delay of 5 seconds, you would have a line like this:

10 T=TIMER:WHILE TIMER<T+5:WEND

The SOUND statement can also be used to create delays by playing a frequency so high that you can't hear it. This line again pauses for 5 seconds.

10 PLAY "MF":SOUND 32767,18.2*5:SOUND 32767,1
 
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hargle said:
what's the history of this game? is it from a book of basic programs?
As a PC/DOS games collector, I would love to know the year this was released and the author - i'll add it to the archive.
Click to expand...

There is three different versions in David Ahl's 101 Basic Games book, and it states that there where a LOT of other different versions at the time of the writing (1978). Back then, they where all text-based.

For source-code (Microsoft-BASIC compatible) and information: http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=106
For information about where the original game came from: http://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/
For even more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game)
 
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I remember playing this on a pdp-8 using Focal. This would be around 1972? Was lots of fun. Later we would try to see how big a crater we could create simply by using no fuel. :)
 
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Thanks for the post, Hargle--so I wasn't hallucinating.

In particular, this fellow remembers it from 1970 on Purdue's CDC 6500.. I seem to remember that it involved both a CPU program and either a dedicated PPU driver or perhaps just the DSD "T" display. The 6630 operator's display was capable of both text and graphics 64x64 text, 512x512 graphics--unbuffered, so the PPU had to continuously redraw the display.

Also, Someone else remembers:
The CDC 6600 is believed to have been the first computer to be designated as a "supercomputer," offering the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds). It was one of the first computers to use Freon refrigerant cooling and was also the first commercial computer to use a CRT console. (CDC checkout engineers created computer games such as Baseball, Lunar Lander, and Space Wars, which became incentives for getting the machines operational. These are thought to be the first computer games that used monitors.)
Click to expand...

They forgot State & Atkin's Chess--a CPU time-burner if there ever was one.
 
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