BASIC 10-Liner Contest 2025 | MSX Resource Center

The annual BASIC 10-liner contest has just started its 2025 edition. This developers compo is all about short BASIC listings, open for all 8-bit computers. The edition of the BASIC 10-liner, organized by the Homeputerium, set its deadline at April 5th 2025.

As part of the Eider-Treene-Schule in Friedrichstadt, The Homeputerium lab maintains of a large number of donated computers from the home computer era between 1977 and 1989. In it, students get to know the computers of this time and learn how to use them. One of their goals is to keep retro-computer history up to par by organizing the annual BASIC 10-liner contest for all 8-bit retro computers.

Participants in the competition are encouraged to demonstrate their creativity by producing software using short BASIC listings. Inclusion of our cherished MSX is welcomed and proves to be a perfect fit for this task with its default installed BASIC system. Previous editions have featured an impressive array of MSX entries before.

This year’s categories to participate in are:

• Category “PUR-80”: Program a game in 10 lines (max. 80 characters per logical line, abbreviations are allowed)
• Category “PUR-120”: Program a game in 10 lines (max. 120 characters per logical line, abbreviations are allowed)
• Category “EXTREM-256”: Program a game in 10 lines (max. 256 characters per logical line, abbreviations are allowed)
• Category “SHOW”: Program a program in 10 lines (max. 256 characters per logical line, abbreviations are allowed); the program can be a demo, a tool, or an application program

Where the first three categories ask for a BASIC game, the Show, or Schau, can be any thing like a demo, a tool or an application program, or anything else you like to code. Submitted programs that do not comply with the rules, however, will be grouped into the “WILD” category.

Since the jurors do not have the original hardware of all approved systems available, all entries should be able to run on an available emulator. No worries, we’ve got openMSX for that. If you’re a BASIC fiddler, have your program delivered to the contest before its deadline: Saturday, April 5, 2025, 6:00 p.m. CET

Relevant link: the BASIC 10-Liner 2025 Contest
Relevant link: Donate to the compo

Source: https://www.msx.org/news/challenges/en/basic-10-liner-contest-2025