Lunar Lander 1969: BASIC and Fortran

• Jim Storer, fall 1969: PDP-8 FOCAL
• David H. Ahl, 1973: BASIC

This game is presented in:

• BASIC lunar.bas adapted from the 1969 source code, compatible with modern ANSI BASIC interpreters.
• Fortran lunar.f90 by Michael Hirsch is also given.

Build

Any Fortran 2008 compliant compiler should work.

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Usage

The program defaults to stdin from user.

./build/lunar-lander

Options:

• -d allows file redirection for testing and optimization
• -f specifies initial fuel weight

To mimic the 1969 results

lunar-lander -f 16000 -d < fail.asc

lunar-lander -f 16000 -d < ok.asc

The final output line is formatted for automatic parsing.

BASIC

For reference the 1973 BASIC program from David Ahl may be run with many ANSI BASIC interpreters like:

bwbasic lunar.bas

Notes

• 1969 fail output
• 1969 success output