Yatzee

Yatzee is my little Basic implementation of a game called Yathzee or Yatzy.

I wanted to introduce my kids to programming, so dug up the good old VIC-20 from the basement. Out of pure joy I then continued to program a little bit, and I ended up with Yatzee.

To honour the good old days, and teach the kids the hard work of a swapper, I also continued to make a cassette with a cover. My son Arvid helped me with the drawing!

• 

• 

• 

For just 9 EUR you can get your very own copy of Yatzee on cassette, including world wide shipping! Just press the PayPal button below, and don’t forget to enter you shipping address in the message.

Any profit from the sale will go to charity, but I doubt t1hat there will be any profit since cassettes is not cheap these days.

UPDATE 2021-05-13: The interest for physical copies was beoynd my wildes dreams, I’m all out of cassettes now. Well, the expectations was not that high, I made 4 copies initially and then 5 more.

While waiting for your physical copy you can of course download Yatzee in various formats.

• Tape image: YATZEE.TAP
• Disk image: YATZEE.D64
• PRG file: YATZEE.PRG
• Source code: YATZEE.BAS

The source code is for CBM Programming Studio, a great IDE for programming CBM Basic on your modern computer. One can be nostalgic over many things, but programming on a screen 22 by 23 characters is NOT something you want to go back to.

The cassette cover says ”for the unexpanded VIC”, but Yatzee is a pure Basic program and will work on every VIC regardless of your expansions. Yatzee will use 3356 bytes RAM, so there is plenty of room left (144 characters!) in you unexpanded VIC.

Here is a demonstration, recorded on my real physical VIC. It will show the loading process in real time, just to show the kids of today how it used to be.