Hammurabi Game Source Code

The Ancient Mesopotamian Law
  1. Hammurabi Code Laws
  2. Hammurabi Game Source Code
  3. Hammurabi Code Full
Code

The classic book BASIC Computer Games, published by Creative Computing, inspired a generation of programmers.The games were written by many people, and compiled by David H. Ahl.The fabulous illustrations accompanying each game were done by George Beker. I've included all the games here for your tinkering pleasure. The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian code of law of ancient Mesopotamia, dated back to about 1754 BC (Middle Chronology). It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code. A partial copy exists on a 2.25-meter (7.5 ft) stone stele.

Hammurabi was an Amorite who lived and reigned from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. He is remembered in history as the 6th king of the Mesopotamian Society. He is known as a great leader who conquered and brought many different kingdoms under the protection and governance of the one great umbrella of Babylon. As a ruler of a large society, Hammurabi recognized the need for organized law and knew that in order to govern effectively he had to establish his authority as a fair and impartial ruler.
CodeIt is generally accepted that Hammurabi’s Code was developed around 1780 BC, during his 44 year rule as king. The Amorites believed that kings were appointed by the gods to administer the law and protect the kingdom. Hammurabi’s Code was a set of 282 laws which established rules for bringing accusations against another and the corresponding punishments to fit the crimes committed, through an “eye for an eye” mentality.
The development of Hammurabi’s Code gave structure and order to the kingdom by addressing each of the three social classes; the poor (mushkenu: a free person who was essentially lower or middle class), the rich (awilu: a free person of the upper class), and the slaves (wardu). The code also shows consideration for the protection of women and children and for the weak and the poor (that they might not be destroyed by the strong or the rich and powerful).
The code also addressed unpaid debt, allowable reasons for a man or a woman to divorce and provisions to be made for spousal and child support. It also established severe consequences for bringing false accusations, or for verdicts and punishments rendered in error. “If a judge tries a case, reaches a decision, and presents his judgment in writing; if later error shall appear in his decision, and it be through his own fault, then he shall pay twelve times the fine set by…..
19 Feb 2016CPOL

Introduction

Michael Birken's Star Trek article rekindled my interest in classic BASIC games.

As a kid, I spent many hours typing in programs from magazines such as Antic, Analog, and Compute!, as well as from various books such as David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games (1978) and More BASIC Computer Games (1979). After typing in a program and getting it to successfully run, the next step would be to make changes, modify code, add features, etc.

Hammurabi was originally written as 'The Sumer Game' (1969) in FOCAL on a DEC PDP-8 computer, by Richard Merrill. Sometime later, it was ported to PDP-8 BASIC. David Ahl ported this version of Hammurabi to BASIC, and added the 10-year performance assessment.

Hammurabi Code Laws

Back in the day, I also played Atari's Kingdom game program which came on cassette. After looking at the BASIC listing for Hammurabi, Atari's Kingdom seems to be a direct port of Hammurabi, modified to use the Atari screen capabilities. Fisher rs 717 manualidades.

Hammurabi Game Source Code

Porting

Code

Hammurabi Code Full

I started out with an Atari 400 home computer back in 1982. At the time, I sometimes found it a challenge to get generic BASIC programs such as the programs in BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games to work correctly. Atari BASIC handled STRING arrays differently than other 8-bit machines of that era. Atari BASIC was also missing FNA(), FNB(), FNC() types of statements which had to be converted to subroutines. Fortunately, Hammurabi did not require any of these changes.

As Michael Birken's article points out, it is fairly easy to port BASIC programs to C#. To Birkenize a BASIC listing, follow these steps:

For example:

becomes:

For example:

becomes:

  • Change BASIC line numbers to C# labels:
  • Change BASIC GOSUB statements to method calls.
  • Change BASIC PRINT statements to Console.Write[Line] method calls.
  • As C# uses zero-based indexing and BASIC uses one-based indexing, for array structures, either modify the data to add an unused zeroth element datum, or modify the code to subtract one from the existing indexing logic.
  • Review remaining statements; modify code, variables, and logic to compile in C#.

Playing

In the game of Hammurabi, you direct the administrator of Sumeria, Hammurabi, how to manage the city. At the start of the game, Sumeria initially has 1,000 acres of land, a population of 100 people, and 3,000 bushels of grain in storage.

You may buy and sell land with your neighboring city-states for bushels of grain. The price of land will vary between 17 and 26 bushels per acre. You also must use grain to feed your people and as seed to plant the next year's crop.

You will quickly find that a certain number of people can only tend a certain amount of land, and that people starve if they are not fed enough. You also have the unexpected to contend with such as a plague, rats destroying stored grain, and variable harvests.

You will also find that managing just the few resources in this game is not a trivial job over a period, of say, ten years. The crisis of population density rears its head very rapidly.

References

  • Dunnington (Broken Link) Wayback Machine entry
  • BASIC source code (Broken Link) Wayback Machine entry

History

  • 19th February, 2016: Initial version