RetroChallenge April/May 2020: Golden Flutes and Great Escapes

I've ported the code of a game for the TRS-80 Model 1/3 from the Book Golden Flutes and Great Escapes: How to Write Adventure Games by Delton T. Horn. The game "The Golden Flute" is a simple adventure game with CRPG elements. The action takes place on a 10 X 10 grid. I added a nifty title screen graphic of  some of the members of the whimsical party of adventurers in the game.

I've also been engaged in some other hi-jinks. The winner of this year's Type-in Mania cup was Darren Ottery of Australia. Darren wrote a prominent early game in the MC-10 community, "Micomania." I remember playing this game as one of my first programs obtained through the Internet. Darren played it recently and posted a video of it online, because he couldn't get my game Miner running on MCX.  So I fixed Miner to work on the MCX and then I tried Micomania again myself just for the nostalgia of it. Well, I couldn't resist trying some of my speedup techniques on it. This morphed into making a better tracking algorithm for the enemy. Finally I did a little graphic editing using SKETCH to spiff-up the title page. In the end I sent it to Darren and he made a few more edits including putting me on the title page, which led to "Micomania 2."

Finally I have worked on some programs from a book for the Dick SMith VZ-200 computer, VZ200 Giant Book of Games by Tim Hartnell. One of the games I have got running on the MC-10 and (hopefully) fully debugged is "Rural Pursuits." Another one I am working on currently is "Chairman of the Board."

Rural Pursuits

There are just so many type-in programs out there it is hard to figure out which one to work on next. Some other folks have also been getting into the Basic program business. I was made aware of the Hartnell VZ-stuff by Mike Hawkey and David Maunder, who are trying to get the programs running on the VZ-200. Fabrizio Caruso posted a completely new puzzle game (with some arcade elements) in the MC-10 Facebook called "Mines Plus."  It's for next year's 10 liner, but although a small program, it is very addictive.  Curtis F. Kaylor posted a math skills game for kids on the MC-10 called "MathCom."  Darren Ottery added to MMania with TypeAttk, which is a typing skills testing program (made even more challenging on a real MC-10 I'm sure).  I have added these folks programs to the "Programmers" directory in my distro of the VMC10 Emulator.

Chairman of the Board by Tim Hartnell