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Comment by cl8ton | Hacker News Reader

The 'Pinball Construction Set' program was advertised, I cant remember the page. I had that program on a Commadore 64 and it was phenomenal for what it did in <40k memory.

It even had a movable cursor using keyboard with drag and drop. It was written by a guy named Bill Bulge best I remember and have always wondered where this guy is today? given how advanced his software was way back then.

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According to Wiki, he's working for Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Budge

Budge has placed the source code to PCS for Apple ][ and Atari 800 on GitHub:

https://github.com/billbudge

Wow thanks... I'm going to download and take a peek. I have great memories playing with that game.

Unless you've worked a lot with 6502s or their brethren, it's going to look like a dense mass of gibberish. Not a lot of comments but excellent use of variable and label names.

Budge's assembly is some of the most clever and compact code I've ever seen for these kinds of processors.

I thought this was funny: Oddly, Budge doesn't like to play arcade and videogames very much. In fact, he says it was "sheer torture" to play pinball steadily for months while working on his construction set. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue57/computer_game....

Another one I remember was Arcade Game Construction Kit that in hindsight blows me away with its power on the C64. A full dev-kit for platformer and top-view games including sprite editor/animator, level-editor, tile-editor, sound-editor, etc. All windowed.

I spent days in a beanbag chair with a comfy Epyx joystick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epyx_500XJ.jpg oh my god that form-factor needs to come back) making games.

Yeah, I have one of those Epyx joysticks too. It's great.

A Speedlink Competition Pro USB looks a bit like this and is available (though not at Amazon anymore).

Interesting, I know that stick as the Konix Speedking.

Not complaining, the more names I find for it, the better chance I have of finding one.

http://www.virtualapple.org/pinballconstructionsetdisk.html

...that cursor is actually really hard to use. I guess mice have spoiled us all.

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