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Basica Games

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wjohnb

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Apr 4, 2014
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Hello all! I used to have a Compaq Deskpro 386/20 back in the 80s and I can remember playing a lot of old Advanced Basic games. The titles I can remember were Kangaroo and Eliza. I believe they all came on a floppy disk or maybe they were pre-loaded with MS-DOS. I can remember having to type either "basicagames" or at a "basica" prompt typing "games". It might have been "C:\basica\games".

Once the program executed, it would pop up with a menu of about 30-40 games which included Eliza and Kangaroo, but there was also a police chase game where you had to set up roadblocks (asterisk symbols) to catch a fleeing criminal. There was also a game that played old classical music (blue danube waltz was one of them).

Most of the games were in black+white, but some (like the music player) had 16 colors. All of the music/sounds were handled by the on-board speaker of course.

Does anyone remember this basica games player, and have access to it in an emulatable format? I have DOS Box, but I would really like to play this game collection again. I think it was just a front-end for several BAS files and I'm pretty sure it came with the Compaq 386/20; we didn't have to buy the basica games specifically. I looked online, but I didn't see that police roadblock game in anyone's basic games collection.

Thanks!
 
I'm not really sure myself. I found an interesting but mostly useless (only place I found mention of it is this site) thing they called the EAGLE GAMES COMPENDIUM (WARREWYK)". But that was just me pecking around for a kangaroo basic game. It doesn't specifically mention the others.

How sure are you of Eliza being part of set? Pretty sure that was sold by itself although not that it couldn't have been bundled.. I'm just wondering if this could have been more of a pirated game collection with a batch file menu system or something?

Just curious. Sounds like a fun collection of games though so definitely curious if you find them or remember any other game names. You might poke around mobygames.com to see if any jog your memory.
 
I've never heard of any of these, unfortunately. I always liked games programmed in BASIC because they were not only fun, but were learning tools as well since I could easily examine the code!

For me, the games were from a company called FriendlyWare, distributed as shareware, and were a handful of games like Sea Battle (a color/graphical take on Battleship), and a few others who's name escapes me at the moment. All were programmed in the mid-1980's for the IBM PC and ran fine in IBM's BASICA and Microsoft's GW-BASIC.

I had some of the old .BAS files I'd saved over the years, but only last year found (some) of the original FriendlyWare software on eBay. I've yet to scan and digitally document everything, but plan on doing so.

I also had a series of TV Series themes songs programmed in BASIC, and several other little minor things from back in the day. Some of the programs were off of official IBM distributions of the day (wish that I could remember them now). I remember one of the more impressive ones to me was the IBM typing tutor that had a simulcrm of the 3 rows of letters on a keyboard, with "hands" hovering over the keys in position, and it would visibly show how your typing went, and visibly show you the correction when you made a mistake.
 
Thanks for the replies! I just remembered that Blue Danube program today so I followed that link for a while on Google. I finally ran into this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_bqgTDtV8s This is the musica.bas program that was part of that sample pack of Basica games! The person in this video is using GW-BASIC though which is almost identical to Basica I believe. From that link, and from this forum post on BetaArchive (http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17404) that it was all a collection of sample Basica files that came with MS-DOS as part of a demo.

Now if anyone has a copy of that, or the ability to emulate that successfully, I would be forever grateful.

Looking at some of the other items that weren't games (piechart.bas, circle.bas, colorbar.bas) this was definitely the pack that I'm remembering. "Games" must have been a subset of the Basica sample library which included kangaroo and that police game along with musica.bas and about 20 others too. I do remember having a lot of fun making pie charts and color bars as well, but I was only 7 at the time :)
 
I don't know where to find the collection of basic programs or the specific kangaroo and police games. Lots of versions of Eliza written in Basic exist and can be easily found.

However, if you prefer not to install some variation of GW-Basic or IBM Basica into DOSBOX, you could install software that runs the same code.
http://www.vintage-basic.net/ Windows Mac and Linux
I know of other applications that emulate the versions of MS Basic used on the C64 or TRS-80 Model III.
 
FriendlyWare does look similar Maverick I'll have to take a closer look. Thanks barythrin for the Mobygames link. I did find a few more games on there that were included in the basica/games directory. I will have to check out loading IBM Basica into DOSBOX too.

Now that I think about it more, my uncle helped set up our computer when we first got it so I'm thinking he had a collection of games that he just put into a directory for us to play with. Eliza was part of that so he may have purchased it himself and made a copy.

Here are a few more that I remember being in that directory :) I guess I'll just have to collect the ones I can recall one at a time.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/bouncing-babies
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/sopwith

I remember a kaleidoscope "game" too that basically just did cool line patterns on the screen.
 
wjohnb said:
Looking at some of the other items that weren't games (piechart.bas, circle.bas, colorbar.bas) this was definitely the pack that I'm remembering. "Games" must have been a subset of the Basica sample library which included kangaroo and that police game along with musica.bas and about 20 others too. I do remember having a lot of fun making pie charts and color bars as well, but I was only 7 at the time :)
Click to expand...

The no games like the piechart.bas are here, at the end of the page, in the DOS11samples.zip

http://peyre.x10.mx/GWBASIC/
 
wjohnb said:
Hello all! I used to have a Compaq Deskpro 386/20 back in the 80s and I can remember playing a lot of old Advanced Basic games. The titles I can remember were Kangaroo and Eliza. I believe they all came on a floppy disk or maybe they were pre-loaded with MS-DOS. I can remember having to type either "basicagames" or at a "basica" prompt typing "games". It might have been "C:\basica\games".
Click to expand...

There were BASIC and BASICA demos on early versions of DOS that included some fairly unsophisticated examples of advanced BASIC operations. These included the music player, an "art" display (random boxes on the screen entitled "The City") circles, etc. There was a game called Donkey in which you "drove" a car on a two lane road - hitting space changed lanes - and avoided donkeys as you went.

Kangaroo and Eliza were definitely NOT on the list.

Sounds like you had something else compiled from those early demos and more.
 
The Bouncing-babies and Sopwith are DOS games. You can find them in DOS archives like www.dosgamesarchive.com
The Kangaroo.bas game is on a PCSIGcd, the PCSIG08 - disk 448. There are more basic games to be found there, maybe your police game without name too. Look on the cdtextfiles site.
 
Thanks for the input everyone! I'll check out dosgamesarchive. I've been there before but didn't do much searching. Erik you mentioned the "City" application. I remember that being part of the pack as well. I'm now thinking that these and Kangaroo/Eliza were part of a disk that my uncle gave us when he set up our machine back in '86.
 
wjohnb said:
Hello all! I used to have a Compaq Deskpro 386/20 back in the 80s and I can remember playing a lot of old Advanced Basic games. The titles I can remember were Kangaroo and Eliza. I believe they all came on a floppy disk or maybe they were pre-loaded with MS-DOS. I can remember having to type either "basicagames" or at a "basica" prompt typing "games". It might have been "C:\basica\games".
Click to expand...

I powered up an Epson 20Mb drive I stole from a Commodore PC.
What you describe here is exactly what I found installed. GAMES, GAMES2, GAMES3, GAMES 4 - you type games and get a menu of titles, most of which seem to run with BASICA. "Bouncing Babies" made me laugh - impossible to play on a 386 though. Each directory had 10+ games in it, they're tiny, and run best on an XT (almost none of them had speed checks).

I left it plugged in, so I'll check for Eliza and Kangaroo. They definitely were once on a floppy disk, because I can see COMMAND.COM in a few of the folders lol - must've been bootable game disks.

I found the game "LIFE" - hard to understand how anyone found that entertaining. Also a terrible version of hangman with a very obtuse dictionary :S and a really bad Arknoid clone (although on an XT, I could see myself playing that for quite a while). With 4 games collections, I didn't get a chance to go through them all - they're just the ones I remember.
 
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That's interesting.. do you have any recollection where the game set came from? I do remember a friend had an XT clone of some sort (I don't remember what brand since I was a kid) but he loved Bouncing Babies (he loved it at the age of 8 or so). I remember his system was only monochrome. I don't remember any other games though on his system. I don't think I ever played Eliza on our Zenith either.

The piechart and all that were demos that came with dos to show off the power of basic programming and show off the colors the system could do.
 
If you're asking me: No idea, just found them on the hard drive.
My guess would be they were probably low cost game compilations. I'll make an effort to archive them. There might be some comments in there somewhere. Hopefully they're the ones being asked about.

One of the "games" menus uses ANSI codes, and I didn't load ANSI.SYS, so it made a big mess of ^]] codes. I thought that was amusing (I remember using those codes in batch files once upon a time).
 
No Eliza or Kangaroo :(

But you can get what I have here.
Each is a folder ~360KB in size, type games to start the menu. If you're using DOSBox, slow the CPU down, my 386SX/33 makes most of the games unplayable.

One of the programs does the IBM Song "Ever Onward" with lyrics so you can sing along (think it's ibmsong.bas)
 
Sort of a merge of topics but this is an interesting comment from some company that was selling an OEM system (Mitsubishi 286). They're saying "20 games" in their ad. I wonder if it's just some company that basically pirated them all together and bundled it.
 
RE: Basica Games

Awesome, SpidersWeb. Thanks! A lot of these filenames look familiar. I suspect what I had was a collection of several of these and more that were copied from floppy to floppy and eventually found their way to us through my uncle who set up our first machine. I just wish I could remember what that poilce roadblock/chase game was called now :confused:
 
I have a ton myself now, I get all mine from the BBS Archive on cd.textfiles.com.

DepthCharge and Maxit were favorites of mine (MAXIT.BAS and DEPTHCHG.BAS).

I also have lots of 5.25"-ers with BASIC programs on them, including a BASIC compiler.
 
krebizfan said:
However, if you prefer not to install some variation of GW-Basic or IBM Basica into DOSBOX, you could install software that runs the same code.
Click to expand...

Also check out http://pcbasic.sourceforge.net, a free emulator specifically for GW-BASIC, (and its siblings BASICA, Tandy BASIC, Cartridge BASIC). It runs BASICA games very well and without any modification, on Windows, Mac & Linux (and anything that can run Python and PyGame). It's still under heavy development (full disclosure: by me) so it's likely to get even better soon.

If you find a game or BASIC program that doesn't work as expected: I'm a fan of bug reports, especially those with BASIC source included (see the feedback link on the site).

I have some links to GW-BASIC & Tandy sources as well on that page, though many of those are reasonably easy to find on Google anyway. I'm intending to include a gallery of games and other BASIC program sources on the web site, to save them from oblivion in the depths of the Internet Archive and cd.textfiles.com...
 
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