How did you come to write games for the 9845 anyway?
Did you sell them?
It's not exactly the most popular game platform.
Well, this friend and I worked at NASA JSC. We were shuttle flight
controllers in the early STS days, including STS-1. (You should see
my collection of stuff from the first shuttle flight!) In our off hours, we
played with the 9845, writing games: lunar landing simulator (which I
did rewrite into C++ and still play), submarine search and destroy
(which I rewrote and was published by Broderbund Software as
"Search and Destroy", car race, solitaire, blackjack, Star Trek, GREAT
baseball and 1-on-1 basketball games, and several others. FAR better
than anything on the market in the early 80s. (Of course, that's the
advantage of having a $70,000 machine at your disposal!)
Never sold them. I left NASA in '82 (to come to Boeing) and
interviewed an HP rep from Corvallis, showed her all the great stuff.
Her response: "Outstanding! How about coming to work for us and
writing aero engineer software for wind tunnel testing and such?"
No thanks.
And do you have any other fun toys in your collection?
I'm being nosy since
we're both in Seattle.
Actually, I do have an *original* IBM PC. March 82, 48k motherboard
(not the later 64k), SINGLE side 160K floppy, Amdek color monitor.
And some games I wrote for that. I'm heartbroken that I threw out my
original DOS 1.0 disks/book back in about '84, when DOS 2.1 came
out. (I do still have all the 2.1 disks & books.)
So, if anyone knows where I could beg, borrow, or steal a DOS 1.0...
;-}
BTW, my wife's uncle still has his original IBM PC Jr, complete with
chicklet keyboard. Gonna half to try to scam him out of that.
BtW, whenever I try to mail to RebelTerry(a)home.net, I
get a message saying
"Relaying denied". I have to use tlb55(a)home.net instead.
No idea what's going on there. Relaying bumps usually happen when
the sender tries going through the wrong SMTP server. Don't know
why the other would work.
P.S. If the BASIC listing uses keywords in optional
ROMs, and the working
machine doesn't have those ROMs, what happens when you try to print out the
listing?
Good question....
Thanks.
RT