The next program in my games past series is actually a set of three programs presented in Basic Computer Games. They are Lunar, Lem and Rocket. They are different versions of the same game. The object of these games is to manually land the lunar module on the moon by adjusting the rate of burn for the retro rockets.
I’ll be starting with Lunar. I don’t know which version is closest to the one I played in high school, but I will say I remember sitting at the teletype and going through yards and yards of yellow paper trying to land that module.
I have typed in the listing for Lunar.
One change I had to make was to line 150. Applesoft does not put any spaces around numbers when they are printed like some basics do. In line 150 we are printing a line of information across the screen which include time, miles, feet, mph, and pounds of fuel. Originally, the program printed mile and feet separated by a semi-colon. This had the effect of printing one long number (ie 120 miles 0 feet became 1200 and 109 miles 5015 feet became 1095015. I fixed this by simply inserting a (” “;)between the miles (a) and feet (calculated).
Along those same lines I had to modify lines 240, 260, and 310 adding spaces required to look right.
It seems to be debugged to the book, but like most programs I’m sure something will pop up.

Leave a Reply