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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

> So 1985 Oregon Trail is written in Applesoft BASIC

This surprised me for some reason, I guess it's been 30-some years but I remember my adventures in Apple II BASIC not running that quickly, but maybe Oregon Trail's graphics was simpler than I remember

I guess I just assumed any "commercial" Apple II games were written in assembly, but perhaps the actions scenes had machine code mixed in with the BASIC code.

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There are so many different versions of Oregon Trail, you might have played the old version first but substituted the graphics and game play you remember with a later version you also played. Not to mention that imagination fills in a lot of the details when you're playing those games, usually as a child.

There are two versions of Ultima 1, the original has BASIC is basic with assembly and there is a remake in pure assembly. You can definitely tell the improvements the asm version brings with the overworld scrolling faster and the first person dungeons redrawing very quickly.

So - I'm guessing game logic of MECC Oregon was in Basic with some assembly routines to re-draw the screen. BTW original Oregon Trail was also 100% basic and a PITA to read. You're really getting to the edges of what applesoft basic is practically capable of with games like Akalabeth and Oregon

That reminds me of finding out Sid Meier's Pirates! on the C64 was a mix of BASIC and assembly. You could LIST a lot of it, but the code was full of SYS calls to various assembly helpers, which I remember was incredibly frustrating as I did not yet have any idea how assembly worked so it felt so close but so far to being able to modify it.

Wikipedia tells me that the 1985 version's hunting minigame is in assembly; it does not explicitly say that the rest is in Basic but it definitely implies this.

Oregon trail was conceptually simple and so well crafted BASIC would be plenty fast. Most other games were move complex and probably needed assembly. Though it was common to call inline assembly (as binary code) in that era as well.

Not uncommon, at least on the A2 and C64, to have a BASIC scaffold acting like a script that runs various machine language subroutines and/or the main game loop.

I also thought it was interesting that it was actually several BASIC programs with data passed back and forth by stuffing it in specific memory locations.

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