Tally · C64 BASIC | Code Like It's 198x

In Reflex the machine measured. Here it discovers. Tally rolls two dice over and over, counts how often each total comes up, and draws the result as a bar chart — and out of all that randomness a shape appears: a bell, tall in the middle at 7, short at the edges. The trick at its heart is emergence: you never tell the program to draw a bell, yet roll enough times and the bell is always there.

A C64 screen, black background: eleven cyan bars rising into a bell curve, tallest at 7, with the totals 2 to 12 labelled beneath. — Where you're headed: a thousand rolls of two dice, counted and drawn as bars — the classic bell, peaked at 7, that no single roll could predict.

This is your first program that holds many numbers in one place. You’ll meet the array — a single named row of counters, one per total — and the value of a dice roll used as the index into it. Then you’ll turn those counts into a picture by POKEing bars straight to the screen, the same screen-as-canvas you met in Skyline, now carrying data.

What you’ll build:

A single die roll, then two dice added into a total from 2 to 12
An array of eleven counters, each total tallied by its own value as the index
A thousand-roll run where the bell appears in the numbers
The same counts drawn as POKEd bars — the bell as a picture
A scale that fits any run to the screen, and labels along the bottom
A run count the player sets, to roll 10, 100 or 1000 and watch the shape sharpen

6 units. About 5–6 hours. This follows Reflex and builds on Meet C64 BASIC.