Progress on Wumpus!

Saturday, 10th August 2019

Over the past few days I've managed to complete my Hunt the Wumpus implementation in Tiny BASIC. Programming in Tiny BASIC for me feels like running a marathon or completing a gruelling assault course - painful, but satisfying and in a strange way enjoyable.

I started out by assuming optional line numbers, and those not limited to a maximum of 255. I'd also included comments and blank lines for readability. After that I manually "renumbered" the program so that the lines all had numbers starting at 1, adjusting the GOTO/GOSUB statements accordingly. That was one of the more tedious parts of the exercise, but resulted in a program that should run on the most basic (ha ha) version of Tiny BASIC - though maybe not in the tiny memory of the machines it was designed for.

An extract from the renumbered 1970s style listing is pictured. I'll spare you the entire listing, for the time being. Now I just have to implement the interpreter so I can test the game!