Starfield on the Apple IIe

The term "scroll art" is new but these text-based programs don't require modern computers. Al Sweigart has ported Starfield to BASIC running on an Apple IIe personal computer. A video recording is on YouTube shorts.

The benefit of scroll art for learning to code is that the concepts are simple enough that they can run on any computer, even those from nearly a half-century ago!

The computer is a 1983 Apple IIe, though the monitor connected to it is from a Commodore 64. They reside at the Recurse Center in Brooklyn, NY amongst other retro personal computers. The source code for the program appears at the beginning after the LIST command is run. This program is running at full speed with no inserted delays! The flickering and diagonal color stripe is not a part of the program; it's a "rolling bar" artifact of the CRT monitor that you don't see with the naked eye.

Joshua Bell has written an Applesoft BASIC emulator online that you can try out in your browser without installing anything.

Here is the BASIC source code:

5 HOME
10 CHANGE = 0.05
20 DENSITY = 0
30 WIDTH = 39
40 IF DENSITY < 0 OR DENSITY > 1 THEN CHANGE = -CHANGE
50 DENSITY = DENSITY + CHANGE
60 ROW$ = ""
70 FOR I = 1 TO WIDTH
80 IF RND(1) < DENSITY THEN GOTO 92
90 ROW$ = ROW$ + " "
91 GOTO 100
92 ROW$ = ROW$ + "*"
100 NEXT I
110 PRINT ROW$
120 GOTO 40