Best way to learn?

[Alessandro]

Hi [mention]OldGamer[/mention],

welcome to the forum You might want to take a look at this other recent thread, there is some information and advice that you could find useful.

[OldGamer]

Thank you!

[Morkin]

Yes, assembler is a complete and total no right now as I'm sure that would be so very complex and I'd probably rage quit haha
So I think yes start simple and I'll read up on the basic language. Although doing some spectrum searches today and I found something called game designer by Quicksilva, that might be worth a look.

...I doubt anyone who codes assembly on here can honestly say they haven't rage quit their code at some point..

When I decided to try assembly (eventually - after about 20 years ) I found it a bit of a learning curve just because it's very different from BASIC, but it's doable even for a non-programmer and once you get over the hump it's quite addictive. And of course it's very fast. But BASIC will give you a good grounding for the Speccy.

I don't think that the Quicksilva program you mentioned is actually a 'proper' game designer, it just gives you a load of simplistic pre-written games you can change the graphics, sound etc. for. I don't think you'd actually learn much re: programming the Spectrum, but I have to admit I haven't actually tried it myself...

[Turtle_Quality]

Just to follow up my earlier comment, BASINC is a Basic development environment that can make it easier to write and debug Spectrum games on a PC, these days everyone is used to cut and paste it can be annoying when they are gone. And it includes a bunch of example .BAS files with very simple versions of many games, such as breakout and blackjack (well Pontoon anyway, isn't that the same thing). So even if you don't want to stay on your native spectrum, it's worth downloading the package to get the example listings.

One thing to note, when BASIN exports basic listings as .BAS it defines the variables at the start (see below). A real Spectrum would not understand these, so don't try to type them in

# Run-time Variables

Var a: Num = 0
Var xc: Num = 10
Var yc: Num = 10

[OldGamer]

Just to follow up my earlier comment, BASINC is a Basic development environment that can make it easier to write and debug Spectrum games on a PC, these days everyone is used to cut and paste it can be annoying when they are gone. And it includes a bunch of example .BAS files with very simple versions of many games, such as breakout and blackjack (well Pontoon anyway, isn't that the same thing). So even if you don't want to stay on your native spectrum, it's worth downloading the package to get the example listings.

One thing to note, when BASIN exports basic listings as .BAS it defines the variables at the start (see below). A real Spectrum would not understand these, so don't try to type them in

# Run-time Variables

Var a: Num = 0
Var xc: Num = 10
Var yc: Num = 10

That sounds great! Thank you, I'll give it a go.

[ZXDunny]

Hey, just a heads-up - if you're learning BASIC on a Speccy, give the BASIC group on Facebook a try. It's chock full of really enthusiastic folk who adore our little language:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZXBasic/

As well as popping your queries in here, of course. And as a group we all recommend you use BASin as the easiest way to code BASIC on a speccy