"Football Manager" By Kevin Toms (1982)

Since I mention a minor (apparent) bug that I think I found in my last post, I should also mention another minor bug that I think I found in another classic BASIC program.  I recently did a port of "Football Manager" to the TRS-80 MC-10. I added some nifty little text graphics to the Dragon 32 version, which I am quite proud of.  They can be seen in the video:

The rendition of games/matches no longer simply displays a changing list of scores of the two teams until the final whistle. Every new score update is attended by a ball being kicked into an ASCII net past a befuddled ASCII keeper. I'm also pretty happy about my modifications to the screen display of stats and numbers and prompts.  The original was a little chaotic, especially in the way it used reverse character messages. I tried to bring some consistency to formatting the screen displays in my final version (completed after the video above).

But on to the bug.  It seems to me that in the Dragon version the variable for storing the amount of your interest repayment was not one of the variables stored when you save the game state while playing.  This means that after you reload the game you are free from interest payments on your loan.  This is a boon and a curse.  It means your loan is not being repaid.  It just remains static.  That is unless you get a new loan, at which point a new value is calculated for your entire amount of debt, so you're back to normal.  So, I imagine that real players are typically getting loans on a regular basis, so perhaps they never noticed this bug.

The problem variable is RE and I just added it to the array that I use to store and then save all the game info to tape.  Here's the line in my code:

53 D(0,0)=RE

I hadn't used D(0,0) yet so I just stuck it there. In any case, if there are any Dragon folks out there who read this, I think there might be a bug to fix the version of the game on the Dragon Archive.

And as I'm writing about national sports, I recently created a new Semigraphics-4 version of the American Flag and a little bit of the American anthem. I'm thinking of using it in some type-in BASIC version of baseball for early 8-bit computers (I've got some code for a small game for the Adam Computer).  But in the meantime here it is: