8 Bits of history: My first game is still available on the internet | Hacker News Reader

8 Bits of history: My first game is still available on the internet

smackeyacky.blogspot.com

116 pointssmackeyacky28 comments

I wish I could post the source code, but I'm not quite sure who owns it as the wild west of Microbee software publishing didn't include niceties like contracts and copyright and whatnot.

You call out the 16 carat bags of gold but I find it way funnier that the enemies are DANGEROUS drunkards. This is really cool.

Oh yeah, quite an insight into the mind of me as a teenager. One thing I didn't mention because it's a tad embarrassing is that the original little character was based on that awful ET game that sold nothing on the Atari 2600. If you squint a bit you can still see the original inspiration.

When you said you got rid of your Microbee stuff, does that mean some collector found and preserved your code years later? That's pretty dang awesome.

I had a bunch of old Amstrad games I wrote in the 80s that I'll probably never see again. Silly little text adventures mainly, also learned binary by poking character maps... a bit sad they're almost certainly lost forever except for dwindling memories in the haze of childhood, super cool to see some of this stuff being preserved for cultural value if anything.

No, nobody kept my stuff, the game was published commercially so I lost my other programs, including an awesome graphing program that could print your graphs to a dot matrix printer. It is a bit sad.

I didn't know the Amstrad used character graphics, they were uncommon in Australia.

I'm also in Australia, most of my mates had C64 or Amiga, but my parents (possibly by being English) got the Amstrad. I only ever came across one other kid with an Amstrad (his family had the 464 tape variant). I agree it was rare here.

Next time I visit my folks I'll check out and see if they have any of my old disks. I doubt anything survived this long but your post has planted a seed of nostalgia.

Microbee Technology currently owns the copyright but has made it available free of charge for personal use via their Forum and Repository at https://microbeetechnology.com.au/forum/index.php

You can also thank the members of MBUG (Melbourne) for "backing up" your game and then me for putting it on disk with menu back in the 80's to make it easy for my kids to play the games :)

Looking at the code, there is no Z80 code for sound in Prospector, just a good use of the Microbee Basic PLAY command.

Alan

Possibly changed after it was sold.

Brought a smile.

Amusingly, I was only just looking through the Microbee Software Preservation Project, at a few of my efforts from the early '80s.

https://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=MS...

And for anyone else with 'Bee nostalgia, here's a very functional Microbee emulator:

http://nanowasp.org/

I can't imagine the amount of work that went into reading those original Microbee tapes into something useful. I guess a lot of the software from Applied Technology or Honeysoft or whoever it was ended up on CP/M disks but somebody had to read the tapes in first. Amazing.

I wrote a DVI previewer for VM/CMS back in the 80s that I kind of wish the source code for was still around somewhere, just to see how bad my coding was when I was a teenager. The awful thing I remember was that there was no caching of bitmap font data so with every character, the program re-read the bitmap from disk.

I made a poker game on my TI-82. Used graph mode to make nice looking cards with rounded corners. It got so large, scrolling through the code was such a chore. Tried to back it up but it was lost when the batteries died. Still pretty sad about that.

Ahhh, yeah, this also reminds me of making a "platformer" on my TI-83 calculator (during class in school, which my teachers hated, of course). Similar to OP in that my code was a twisted mess of a thousand lines of GOTO statements, and similar issues with draw functions... I remember having to manually use pixel on/off in loops because it rendered a lot faster than using an algorithmic draw. Graph mode for less action-oriented games is probably a smart move.

I still have a microbee. A 56k dual 5.25" floppy beast. I fired it up recently and it all works. Most of the disks are readable too.

good times....

I never got as far as the disk drive variants, the next PC in the house was a Sanyo MBC-550, which was the strangest near-IBM clone ever. It was 2nd hand and relatively cheap, the reason being it was OK on dos based software that stuck to the BIOS routines (like Wordstar) but hopeless on everything else, due to some weirdness with the graphics card in it.

I see the Microbee's come up occasionally on Ebay but they are just a bit expensive for something I would only play with briefly and then put back in the cupboard.

We had a 16k tape only bee before the disk one. I loved that they had battery backed SRAM. You could turn it off and come back later and your program was still there.

I just had a look, and didn't find anything, but I have a sneaking suspicion I have a copy of your game on one of my games compilation disks.

The battery backed ram was a neat feature, almost entirely necessary as the cassettes were a major time waster (although that might have been the cheap cassette player I was using). I modded my Microbee to have a switch on the battery backup so you could save the very expensive battery when I wasn't using that feature. There was another crazy home-grown box hanging out the back based on a project kit you could buy that had several EPROM sockets on it, so you could have the WordBee and EDASM proms available. From memory it switched between the roms by switching out the leg that had power going to it, with a very carefully soldered prom socket on a ribbon cable heading into the back of the bee via that big unused expansion socket. My soldering skills were severely challenged by that simple project.

Oh yeah, I remember that the battery was an odd size and expensive. I think it was 4.5V(?). We had a battery holder for some AAs hanging out the side.

I feel like our 16k bee had more than one ROM in it. I think you could boot into word bee by doing <reset>W and basic with <reset>M

I dont have the 16k bee to check. I kinda wish I did. The disk ones were more serious computers at the time, but I'm strangely more nostalgic for the tape ones. I think there's less magic associated with the tapes.

Ugh those tapes. At one point I set aside the tape player that came from the chemist (Hanimex?) and purchased a special "computer tape player" from somewhere (may have been Tandy) that was supposedly optimised for computer use. It was worse. Trying to fiddle with the tape head azimuth to read some 3rd party tape using a set of headphones was not the ideal way to spend an afternoon. I don't miss cassettes as data storage.

> From memory it switched between the roms by switching out the leg that had power going to it,

Somewhat more likely that it had constant power and ground to all chips and switched the output-enable pin on the EPROM you wanted to be active. (Many chips are not spec’d to have inputs driven many volts above the power input level, hence the output-enable/chip-select pins.)

I also look back to projects that taxed my abilities at the time (software and hardware) that I wouldn’t even notice as being part of the project now. I’m only reminded when I see my kids come up that similar curve.

That does sound more likely. There was a rotary switch on that single line to the eproms, but the kit did come with a warning you shouldn't switch them while the computer was running. Was certainly a lot easier than levering out your expensive eprom. In retrospect it was a stupid way to distribute software, but the microbee couldn't fit the word processor and assembler in memory at the same time.

I'm really upset that I took my old Commodore 8088 to the tip when it seemed obsolete. Not in the least because it had a few games I'd written in assembler on it.

At the very start of my career I was writings educational games and 6502 libraries for use in these games. Sadly, I believe most of it is lost.

I wish my games were pirated more often…

The first computery thing I every wrote was a simple interactive fiction game using the ADRIFT system. It's archived online and I've played it. 10-year-old me really couldn't spell well.

I've tried to edit it but it's password protected and I can't remember the password. I wonder if it's relatively easy to crack.

I thought my first programmy/computery thing I did was make games on the BYOND platform but I completely forgot about ADRIFT! I wish I could remember what my ADRIFT games even were because I'd love to explore the psyche of my 10-year-old self as well.

This is cool. I like the greenscreen graphics. Reminds me of robotron.

On my 'bee the original monitor was a converted black and white TV set, so the graphics were originally a pale, faintly blue colour the cheap CRTs used to output instead of pure white. The emulator does green by default and it is probably close to what somebody with a fancier Microbee setup would have had back then.

I had a Commodore 64, and later we got a Microbee for some reason that I don't recall (this was in Sweden, and Microbee definitely was not common there). The C64 was obviously a better machine, and the one I used most of the time. However, I didn't have a monitor for it and had to compete with the rest of the family to use the TV in the living room.

At some point I decided to see what happened if you connected the Microbee monitor into the C64. Turns out it worked, even though it's was all black&white but it worked. At least I could do C64 programming in my room.

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