Classic Usborne computer books available for free

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Just noticed this:

https://usborne.com/browse-books/featu ... g-books/

All the classic books available in PDFs.

[TMD2003]

Top banana! I had that Usborne Guide to Better BASIC when I was a nipper. It was probably one I borrowed from the library in Great Dunmow on long-term loan, mind...

[PeterJ]

I remember these being mentioned ages ago on a certain other website, but it's still good to be reminded of them. The machine code book is rather good.

Please note
These books were written for 1980s computers such as the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro. The programs will not run on modern computers. For any enquiries please use the Contact us form.

Have they not heard of the Spectrum Next?

[Firefox]

I had Computer Spacegames!

I also had another one that's not there, Computer (and Video) Games. I remember it had illustrations of the insides of video games with tiny robots whizzing about carrying little pieces of paper (information), to and from the "RAM" and "ROM" rooms and presenting them to an electronic brain, the "CPU".

They also had a few pages on what games would be like in The Future. Mad stuff like, handhelds will have colour LCD screens with realistic graphics, and they'd have tiny radios in them that'd allow you to play a game against someone in another country! And multiplayer games will be able to handle enough players that you'd be able to form teams and play against each other! Crazy, crazy stuff!

Ah, here we are:

https://archive.org/details/UsborneGuide/

Good old Internet Archive.

[RWAC]

This is fantastic! I had some of these books, Better Basic and Fantasy Games.

I may need to type in the listing and see how it compares to my memory of it! Too bad I'm back to work Thursday!

[+3code]

I see that many of the games in those books are available:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... l_id=14966

but not all. Dungeon of Doom ("Write your own fantasy games") we don't have it, but I found the listings of c64 version:

https://github.com/HAnthonyHoyt/c64-dungeon-of-doom

I think with BASIN will be easy to adapt, I will see it...

[+3code]

I think with BASIN will be easy to adapt, I will see it...

I had forgotten this. This is a preliminary version. I have removed the specific c64 lines, added the specific ZX lines and modified the rest of the listing according to the book. I've also tweaked sequences like:

1 PAPER X
2 INK AND
3 PRINT Z

For this other:

PRINT PAPER X; INK Y; Z

I may have forgotten something

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10YJcpH ... sp=sharing

[akeley]

Fabulous find. Some of the illustrations in these books are really top notch.

And a really, really nice gesture by Usborne. Only wish some others would follow suit and stop copyright smauging their hoards.

[TMD2003]

And a really, really nice gesture by Usborne. Only wish some others would follow suit and stop copyright smauging their hoards.

ACHTUNG, OFF TOPIC, SORT OF:

Fans of Fifth Gear may or may not be aware that a huge treasure trove of the old episodes, all the way back to its launch in, what was it, 2001 - are posted on YouTube. Some of them are cut down a bit, some of them are cut down a lot, but they are - as far as I know! - officially sanctioned. See it this way: why would they not do this? Clips of Old Top Gear (i.e. the 1977-2001 version) posted by various users who have collected them get a niche audience that at least proved that there are people who want to relive "the good old days of motoring TV" when it wasn't all about million-pound supercars (usually, annoyingly, accompanied by the sound of endless, tiresome *autistic screeching* in the comments about Jeremy Clarkson and The Grand Tour and THEY RUINED EVERYTHING), but it's unlikely that the BBC would ever do the same as Channel 5 - or, possibly, Fifth Gear's production company - have done. "Copyright Smauging their hoards" is about the best description I can think of for the BBC's archives of programmes that were highly topical and ceased to be of profitable use to them barely a few months after they'd been transmitted. If they ever did open up their "Smauged hoard", I'd like to see the original, non-UKTV-cut versions of Clarkson's Car Years and Motorworld, as well as the entire run of The Car's The Star... and From A To B: Tales Of Modern Motoring... and so very much more, all in iPlayer quality rather than "30-year-old VHS tape transferred to low-resolution AVI" quality.

(Insert comment about Codemasters, Odin/Thor, Activision and so on to keep it on topic, though this particular dead horse has been flogged so many times that it's little more than a puddle of horse paste with tiny fragments of bone in it at this stage...)