January 2016 45
Vintage Computing
As described in last
month’s issue of Nuts &
Volts, the Mentor’s Friend
is a retro computer that
you build yourself and
program in BASIC. It is
easy to build and fun to
play with, and it offers a
superb technology
mentoring platform you
and your child (or
grandchild) can build and
use together to explore
computers and
programming.
Five Easy Projects
for Your
Mentor’s Friend
By Dane Weston Post comments on this article and find any associated files and/or downloads at
www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/article/january2016_RetroComputer_Amigo.
Once you’ve built yours, here are five easy projects to get you and a young one started on a technology adventure. These have been selected to be engaging, and to give you and
your student a hands-on introduction to different
components of Color BASIC. For reference, you may
find it helpful to download the “Intro to Color BASIC
Commands” from the article link. Have fun!
1. KEYNUM.BAS.
Color BASIC often takes user input from the keyboard as
individual keystrokes, with each key represented by an assigned
integer number. So it’s important to know what number
represents each key. This first program does that translation for
you, and as a bonus shows you the character glyph for any key
press.
To input the program, type NEW <Enter> at the flashing
rectangle cursor on your Amigo, then press <F1> on your
keyboard to enter the Color BASIC editor. Next, type in the code
that follows; press <Enter> at the end of each line. In the editor,
you can use the arrow, <Home>, and <End> keys to navigate, and
the <Backspace> and <Delete> keys to erase text.
When you’ve finished typing in the code, press <F1> again to
return to Color BASIC and run the program. Don’t worry if you
see a syntax error — just use the editor again to find and correct
the offending line.
