Old BASIC games that deserve a Machine Code remake

[Turtle_Quality]

One of the things I found frustrating about BASIC compilers was that you could pretty much only use half the memory (as the generated machine code usually took up as much space as the BASIC) so I'm quite surprised that Football Manager could be compiled at all. Was it really small enough or did you have to make optimisations to the original program to get it to work?

Ooh now you're asking, it was 35 years ago... . there was little or no array support in the compiler, so data needed to be setup where possible with structured peek and poke instead. But that also meant I could save the data as a code file and remove the basic lines that setup the data, which needs half the space data statements in Basic reading into arrays. I also remember poking many of the strings in big print statements (like the picture of the FA Cup) to memory. Having a Microdrive helped given I had to reload the data every time I screwed up

[DouglasReynholm]

Mined Out, my second ever Speccy game after Kong, was coded in Sinclair BASIC. Essentially an earlier version of Windows Minesweeper, at least as far as I recall - I haven't played it in the last 35 years... Might make quite a nice upgrade from UDGs to sprites and maybe 'arcade' it up a little.

I remember it being my first successful use of the 'BREAK' key....
... could you imagine any modern tech coming out with a button marked 'BREAK' on it?