Looking for a game I wrote

[Prospector]

Back in the early 1980s when I was like 13 or 14.  Was a (mostly) GW-Basic game called "Prospector", lost the last copy I had after I sold all my microbee stuff in the 1980s.  Was published by Microbee people at the time, if anybody has one let me know I would like to play it for old times sake.

[ChickenMan]

Hi Prospector and welcome to the forum

We have a game called Prospector, described as 

A mini arcade style game. You are an old prospector picking up gold nuggets. As you go around picking them up, you must avoid the two robbers who attempt to catch you and steal them. If you collect the diamond first, you will receive double points for all the gold nuggets that you collect.  Written by a David R. and sold by Microbee.

Does that sound like your game and see below ?  If so, its on our Games_4_ds80 disk in our Repository in the MbeeTech\Microbee\Software\Games folder. Apply for Repository access here https://microbeetechnology.com.au/forum/....php?fid=2   Install ubee512 emulator and run with  ubee512 -a games_4_ds80.dsk.  If you just want that game only I can make it available so you can play it online at www.nanowasp.org

   

[Prospector]

That's it!

Good gravy - can't wait to show my kids they will have much fun at my expense!

edit:  a bit of background just cause the nostalgia came flooding back after the screenshot was posted.

The game was actually inspired by seeing an awful game on one of the Atari consoles called "ET" based on the movie.  The graphics were so bad and the game play was so rotten I figured *anybody* could do better.  A lot of the programming I did originally was for my own amusement (converting TRS-80 basic stuff to the Microbee was how I kind of got started, with the classic "101 computer games" book that was widely available back then).

Anyway, armed with plenty of articles from the various Microbee user groups and the trusty programming handbook / user guide I gradually picked through how the PCG graphics worked, stole some assembly based sound routines from another article and put that game together.  It has no real strategy or depth to it, I think it will occasionally put an impossible screen up as well (where the character can't collect everything he needs) and the delay that slows down the movement of the two nefarious cowboys is about the only thing that changes over time.

I showed it to the guys that ran the Microbee shop in Cooleman court in the ACT and they got weirdly excited about it and asked me to submit it to Microbee to get published - I think I made the princely sum of $500 out of it which Microbee probably never got back in sales.  It might have sold for $14.95 or something like that on cassette.  Never wrote another game after that and stuck to programming for my own needs (wrote a graphing program on that 'bee for a high school project which was pretty nifty).  Can't remember which house move prompted the dumping of all those cassettes, that 32K Communicator (originally a 16k machine running 2mhz I think), a kit "rom swapper" so I could switch between the word processor and the "EDASM" rom and a mono cassette player.

That little 'bee had a switch I had to carve in the side of the housing the swap between 2mhz and 3.77mhz (was it?  I can't remember) to play some of the original games.  The original monitor was a modified black and white TV that never did work quite right.  The user group in the ACT was very active for a short period of time at least, used to meet in the library of one of the high schools.

  Never did upgrade to CP/M I think by the time that became available the IBM compatibles had flooded the market.  I remember seeing the pages and pages of ads for "phoenix bios" machines coming out of California at increasingly lower prices in magazines and figuring the poor little 'bee didn't have a chance.

I figure I didn't know any better so it's OK ha ha.  I've been programming for the best part of 35 years having got my start on the Microbee and I still see echoes of a lot of that code in what I do now.  Bit bashing an I/O port to make noises?  Still doing it on my current project.  Desperately trying to get everything to fit in a restricted memory space?  Still doing it.

I did abandon the Microbee after I saw my first Unix system at University and owned a lot of "the enemy" IBM compatibles in that time but they never did replicate that spirit of experimentation that those 8 bit machines had in the early 1980s.  The IBM world seemed very hard to program for since you had to buy a toolchain to do any development unlike some of the other stuff that was available.

That original hacking spirit seemed to shift to the various 'nixes after that.  Now half the stuff I do is either embedded programming or big things that reside in far away clouds, or phone apps.  You can't go to Tandy / Radio Shack /Computerland to play on stuff.  Myer don't stock TI/994A that nobody bought anyway.  I have a super computer in my pocket but these things don't seem to inspire the kind of sense of wonder / limitlessness that the 8 bit era inspired.

[Prospector]

Hi Prospector and welcome to the forum

We have a game called Prospector, described as 

...  If you just want that game only I can make it available so you can play it online at www.nanowasp.org

If you could throw it up on www.nanowasp.org that would be awesome.
cheers,dave.

[ChickenMan]

A good story, thanks for that.  Your right though, the whole spirit of computing on the early 8 bit computers of the 80's has been lost.

Oh, check your email, have fun