Atari 8-Bit Action

At the end of each year, I write a letter surveying the computer history work that I did in the past year. I’ve been doing this annual ritual since 2016, making this my tenth letter. It’s true that I write these for my Patreon backers, but mostly I write them for myself: to take in the view of the grand forest of a year’s work — rather than my day-to-day view, myopic close-ups of the trees.

I sometimes also use these letters to set goals (usually as a number of interviews for the next year) and keep myself accountable for meeting those goals. At the end of 2024, I wrote that my goal for 2025 was to publish a dozen interviews on the ANTIC podcast. I didn’t come close! I published three: with Stanley R. Trost, creator of Financial Cookbook, published by Electronic Arts in 1984; Steve Kranish, creator of the Atari 8-bit and Atari 5200 versions of Frogger; and brothers Bill and David Lappen, founders of Buy-Phone.

Buy-Phone could reasonably call itself the first online yellow pages. It was a text-based dial-up service — available at 300 and 1200 bits per second — that provided business listings, movie times, and personal ads, all for free to callers. The service launched in late 1982 and was limited to the West Los Angeles area. Buy-Phone has a personal connection for me: I used it when I was a kid, and made a friend via its personal ads. In addition to the interview, the brothers Lappen sent a large amount of documentation in the form of advertisements, clippings, and ephemera.

Hybrid Arts was an early pioneer in MIDI music equipment, creating MIDI hardware and software for Atari 8-bit and ST computers. I interviewed the founders in 2024; in 2025 co-founder Robert Moore lent me dozens of disks of Hybrid Arts software, which I was able to image and share with the Atari software preservation community. Later, I met Robert in person: he graciously let me search his garage, and we found dozens more Hybrid Arts floppies, which I plan to digitize in 2026.

I also archived a very complete set of software, manuals, and catalogs published by Mad Scientist Software for Atari 8-bit, Apple II, and Windows computers. Created by an emergency room doctor, the software was meant to train health practitioners in Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support techniques.

In my 2024 interview with Vince Cate, he told me all about his product Critical Connection, which was software and a special cable for connecting an Atari 8-bit to a CP/M machine. This year he sent me the 1982 source code on an 8-inch floppy disk, which I was able to read and put up on GitHub. Vince open-sourced the code.

Harry Stewart, ex-Atari contractor who programmed the PILOT, PILOT II, and WSFN languages, died in 2025. (Here’s his obituary. Here’s my 2017 interview with Harry.) His daughter sent me a heavy box of his Atari documents. I scanned some of them years ago when he lent them to me; others are unpreserved. I’ve been carefully sorting through those documents, scanning the unpreserved material and uploading it to Internet Archive. It’s slow and careful work, and there’s much more to come.

This was an exciting surprise: I received and scanned the manual and complete printed source code for “Air Navigation RNAV” — a set of tools for private pilots created by Robert A. Tims — with versions for the Atari 8-bit and Hewlett Packard 41-C. In 2025, I moved this software from the “completely unknown” column to the “completely saved” column. I hope the Atari and HP communities will get these typed in and running on those systems in 2026.

While we’re on the topic of scanning: this was a lovely, unexpected project. Mark Knutsen sent me a 2-inch binder of Atari user group newsletters from around the United States and Canada, all with the cover date of August 1987: a perfect time capsule of the state of the Atari scene that summer. I scanned them all: you can read them in one 700-page book, or browse them individually.

I also scanned a bunch of Jersey Atari Computer Group newsletters. We’re trying to make a complete collection, slowly filling in the gaps as we find more issues. I’m maintaining a spreadsheetdocumenting the issues we have and don’t have yet.

For the Scantastix project, in which I scan a variety of overlooked material, I scanned a bunch of Apple II, TI 99/4A, and Kaypro manuals and newsletters: more than 91 items (although I forgot to give many of them the stx_ identifier when uploading so the number is higher.)

Those are the big achievements. Here is a potpourri of smaller projects done in 2025:

• I tech edited Pawel Grabarczyk’s forthcoming book about the Atari 8-bit computers titled At the End of the Rainbow, which will be published by MIT Press.

• I rented a large format scanner to scan a couple of Atari-related posters: one of a fantastical scene of the moon Titan, from A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazine, drawn by Don Dixon. (I’ve had this poster since I was a kid, so if the scan isn’t in the best shape, that’s why.) And a poster advertising Donnie Iris’ 1983 album “Do You Compute?” featuring an Atari 800 computer.

• I helped shepherd two more editions of The Secret Guide to Computers into the Internet Archive. In 2022 I worked with the author, Russ Walter, to make most of the 34 editions of the book available on the Internet Archive. In 2025 we added two missing editions: the 18th and 21st editions, published in 1993 and 1995. (The earliest editions still missing from the collection are from 1979 and earlier.)

• In 2024 I interviewed Robert Leyland, who programmed AtariArtist, KoalaPainter, MicroIllustrator, Murder on the Zinderneuf, and other applications for several microcomputers. In 2025, Steve sent me hundreds of source code floppy disks, which I digitized. I assembled a little group called Team Zinderneuf: we’ve started to figure out what’s on the disks and prepare to release the code. There’s much more work to do here in 2026.

• Finally, look at these beautiful photos digitized from slides of the 1981 communications exhibit at the Capital Children’s Museum (featuring many photos of kids using Atari 8-bit computers!) My involvement was mostly just reminding people to do things, then uploading the images, but look at them! So pretty.

My work at Internet Archive as the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications continues. In 2025, the grant-funded project scanned more than 750,000 pages of radio-related manuals, newsletters, documents, catalogs, and other material. DLARC has been called a “transformative” project for the amateur radio hobby.

2025 was a challenging year for me personally (specifically, becoming an empty nester; and generally, living with racist fascists in charge of my country). But from a computer history standpoint, the year was somehow surprisingly productive. What do you know, a whole lot of trees sprouted in the forest this year.

Many of these successes boil down to patience and persistence. I’ve typed those two words a few times in ten years of writing these letters. Asking people for software or printouts then politely reminding them for months or years. Returning to a stack of disks or a box of papers day after day to scan, upload, and add metadata, so they’re properly preserved. And, in an otherwise productive year when I published “only” three interviews, being patient with myself.

Looking forward, I intend to maintain the momentum. My immediate goals for 2026 are to finish up the disk fluxing/digitizing/scanning projects that are already on my plate: the second batch of Hybrid Arts disks, the Robert Leyland/Team Zinderneuf source code trove, and the Harry Stewart estate papers. And to do interviews, more than three.

As always, I’m on the lookout for new opportunities to use my skills to preserve computer history. To support my work, please join my Patreon. Or donate to Internet Archive. Or both.

If you do social media, you can follow me on BlueSky or Mastodon.

It’s time for my annual letter summarizing my computer history work in the past year. It’s an opportunity to take stock, reflect on accomplishments, and make a plan for the new year.

My headline for 2024 was discovering and digitizing 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a radio program that aired from 1983 through early 1986. It included computer news, product reviews, and interviews. Except for one episode, the recordings were entirely lost — until some of the tapes showed up on eBay. I bought them, launched a GoFundMe to have them professionally digitized, and uploaded them to Internet Archive with the blessing of the show’s creators. I got very lucky along the way — in discovering that the tapes existed in the first place, and that they hadn’t been erased in the past 40 years. The whole experience was amazing. I was interviewed along with Ellen Fields, one of the show’s creators, about the project on the Radio Survivor podcast. It was a super interesting conversation, worth listening to if you want the backstory.

The bad news — or perhaps the to-be-continued part? — is that hundreds of episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe are still lost. I hope with all my heart that they too will turn up, but I fear that they’re gone forever.

My goal for 2024 was to publish 15 interviews in ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. Success! Around October I noticed that I hadn’t published any interviews yet, so buckled down and met the goal. Some of the interviews I recorded recently; some were older interviews that I hadn’t yet managed to edit and publish. I’m happy to say that I’m almost caught up on getting those older interviews out the door. I expect to get through the backlog, and record plenty of new interviews, in 2025.

Highlights for me included interviews with Robert Leyland, programmer of Murder on the Zinderneuf, AtariArtist, KoalaPainter, and other Atari software; Nick Kennedy, creator of SIO2PC; and Mary Eisenhart, editor of MicroTimes magazine.

I finished shepherding the digitization of MicroTimes magazine at Internet Archive. Now that we’ve digitized 276 issues totaling 59,103 pages, the project is complete! (At least for now. A dozen  issues from December 1985 to January 1987 are missing. When those are found, we’ll scan those too.) My interview with Mary was the capstone of the project. She jokingly called the magazine “fish wrap,” but in reality, the California-based magazine did vital work reporting on the burgeoning computer industry from the state of Silicon Valley.

After years of my gentle reminding/nagging/harassing, Lee Pappas of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazine sent me a box of Atari floppy disks to image. Some of them were nothing exciting — programs and files that have been available in the Atari scene for ages. But as I hoped, there were some treasures in the box. One was a semi-playable prototype of a game called Titan. It was to be published by A.N.A.L.O.G. Software, but was apparently never completed. It’s very pretty, but it has no collision detection or sound. Members of the Atari community have begun reverse engineering the game with the goal of making a completed version.  The box also included a game called Sunday Driver — also unfinished. I couldn’t get it to run, but hopefully someone else in the Atari community will have luck with it.

Those were the most obvious cool things in Lee’s disk collection — but there were 50+ more disks, which I imaged using the Applesauce Floppy Disk Controller and uploaded to the AtariAge forum. On December 31, I invited the community to search the files to find what other treasures might be hidden. They’ve already found several previously unknown or unarchived programs, such as Outpost, an arcade-style game.

Valerie (Atkinson) Manfull, who was a member of Atari's Game Research Group, sent me a U-Matic format videotape titled “Atari Demo Compilation”, which I had professionally digitized. It’s a rare record of Atari Research’s work in computer animation and character design. Dated March 1984 (four months before Jack Tramiel fired everyone), this videotape was exhibited at the SIGGraph Computer Aided Design show. It includes video of Fish Tank and “Artificially Motivated Objects” demonstrations, both done using an Atari 8-bit computer. I’d heard about both demos in interviews, but the code has never been found.

I was also able to share a few documents from the estate of Larry A. Summers, sent to me by his family. Larry worked at Atari in the early 1980s in the Games Design Research Group. The documents include “Atari 81” v1n4, an internal Atari publication that I was previously unaware of; Chris Crawford’s recommendation letter for Larry Summers; and the Functional Specification for a game called The Arabian Adventures. After Atari, Larry went to work at Packet Technologies, a company that was building interactive software for cable TV. This is the spec for what would have been the company’s first game. It is unclear if the graphical adventure actually made its way to customers’ TV sets.

I donated the originals of Larry’s documents and Valerie’s videotape to The Strong National Museum of Play, where the physical objects will be preserved and made available to researchers. 

It took three years of persistence with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it finally happened in 2024: I got Atari Corporation’s Prospectus and Form S-1. Those are the documents that the company filed when Jack Tramiel took Atari public in September 1986. The 400-plus- pages are filled with detailed insider information about the company, including balance sheets, legal settlement agreements, and a list of Atari’s subsidiary companies. Thanks, Freedom of Information Act! (The S.E.C. said they took three years to produce the files because of a mandatory work-from-home policy after COVID-19 — then their microfiche machine was broken.)

I also received and archived the business plan for Superboots, an educational software development effort sponsored by Atari with an office at the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C. The company's first program was PAINT!, a drawing program for the Atari 8-bits.

Dan Kramer, who worked at Atari designing trackballs and joysticks and other things, sent me another trove of documents which I uploaded to Internet Archive, including a 1981 report titled “A Qualitative Investigation Of Programmable Videogame Controllers”, a humorous (but real) Management Recognition Award that Dan received in 1984, and the schematics for Atari Cindy. "Cindy" was the code name for the Atari CX2800 (sold in the Japanese market), and the design was re-used for the Sears Video Arcade II home game console. 

I was able to archive every issue of “Quick Strokes” and “Dvorak D(e)velopments” — newsletters about using the Dvorak keyboard that were published from 1973 to 1990. They were provided to the Internet Archive by my friend Randy Cassingham. And, I scanned and archived every issue of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. Verbatim was a literary magazine aimed at reporting language and linguistic issues for non-specialist readers, published from 1974 through 2008. The final editor, Erin McKean, even released them under a Creative Commons license. For my Scantastix project, I scanned a few hundred pages of newsletters and manuals related to the Texas Instruments 99/4A, Apple II, and early Macintosh software. 

My buddy Ken Gagne found a pile of interesting cassette tapes on the giveaway table at the annual Apple II convention KansasFest, and sent them to me to digitize. On them were ten ComputerLand radio commercials that aired from 1985-1989. Some were local spots for ComputerLand of San Bernardino, California; others appear to be national spots. Also, 14 ComputerLand Micro Minutes commercials — short radio spots meant to educate about technology topics like computers in movie making, telecomputing, and even communicating with animals through technology. Another tape was a 1991 recording of Tom Milks giving a KansasFest talk titled “Applied Engineering's View of the Apple II.”  In it he tells "the truth behind the wild rumors and accusations regarding one of the oldest Apple II third-party companies."

My work at Internet Archive as the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications continues apace. In 2024 the project scanned more than 1.1 million pages of radio-related manuals, newsletters, documents, catalogs, and other material. (Sometimes DLARC intersects with my computer history work. For instance, here’s the CP/M source code for the AMRAD Packet Repeater.)

There we have it, that’s my 2024 wrapped. If you want to support my computer history work, please support my Patreon. Or, donate to Internet Archive.

Well, that about wraps it up for 2023, which means it’s time for my letter summarizing the computer history work that I did in the past year. I’ve been writing these letters since 2016, making this my eighth annual letter. I wish I had started this tradition in 1996, the year that my computer history efforts began when I launched the Digital Antic Project, which grew into Classic Computer Magazine Archive.

My goal this year was to publish six interviews on Antic: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. I published just one. (It was a good one, with Rodrigo Castro about Atari in Chile. Why not six? My Internet Archive work and, simply, a lack of momentum on interviews. Once the process is going, it’s going! But getting that engine re-started is hard.) My goal for 2024 is to publish 15 interviews, which I fully expect to actually do. Between us over the years, Randy Kindig and I have published 436 interview episodes on Antic. Our collective goal is to reach 500 by the end of 2025. So to keep my end of the bargain, that means I’ll publish 15 interviews in 2024.

Scanning, though! I turned all sorts of rare paper material into easily-searchable digital material at Internet Archive. I scanned a lot of Atari newsletters, including many from Hughes El Segundo Employees Association Atari Computer Enthusiasts, South Bay Atari Computer Enthusiasts, and West LA Atari Users Group.

In other scanning news — let’s talk about MicroTimes. MicroTimes was a California-focused computer magazine that was published from 1984 through 1999. It was there in the thick of it, published in the state that brought us Silicon Valley. I wrote for MicroTimes for a few years starting in 1992. So I am especially proud of this: 41 issues of MicroTimes magazinewere added to Internet Archive in 2023, bringing the collection to 62 issues. Here’s the long-story-short summary of 10 years of effort: I made this happen. I willed it to happen. More issues will be added in 2024.

I also added two more books to the collection of Russ Walter’s Secret Guide To Computers at Internet Archive. The newest additions are hard-to-find editions from 1976, about BASIC programming and computer applications.

My Scantastix project (if you don’t know what that is, here’s a short article describing it) did some great work: we scanned 321 items totaling 22,577 pages. The scans include some rare Microsoft material, even rarer pamphlets and manuals for Compucorp computers (have you ever heard of them? The computer that came with them is on its way to Vintage Computer Federation) and so many Apple II manuals. Check out all the latest additions here.

Also, a weird scanning side-quest happened this year: My friend Cabel Sasser handed me a pile of more than 50 DAK catalogs, which I scanned for him, then he wrote a blog post about them that blew up the Internet for a few days. It’s a fun read.

Once again, I processed and edited videos of the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival West 2023and VCF East 2023. And I helmed a project to rescue audio from VCF West 2003. These were recordings that were made of talks twenty years ago, then the tapes were lost, then found, then given to me, then it turned out that the tapes were recorded terribly. It took a small team of people to get any sound at all from those tapes then turned into something listenable. They include the voices of C. H. Ting, Jef Raskin, John Ellenby, and Gary Starkweather, who have all passed since these were recorded.

When I interview a programmer, I ask the person if they have any source code. I interviewed Jay Jaeger, creator of the Atari Program Exchange version of Space War, in 2016. At the time he said he had the source code… somewhere. I contacted him from time to time to ask about that source code. (I have a “nag list” of people that I contact from time to time to ask them about some material or other.) Patience and persistence paid off. Just a few days ago, in December 2023, he found the assembly language source code and sent it to me to share.

A bit of personal archiving: I write for Juiced.GS magazine, which focuses on the Apple II. I uploaded all of the articles I've written for Juiced to Internet Archive, spanning 2015–2022. There are some interviews, some product reviews, and some nice little reminisces about the old days of microcomputers. (I released them under a Creative Commons license, so if you want to republish an article in a non-commercial computer club newsletter or something like that, go for it. My agreement with the magazine says that they get exclusive rights to articles for a year. So my 2023 articles will be shared online a year from now. In the mean time, it’s a good magazine: if you like Apple II, subscribe!)

My work at Internet Archive as the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is certainly one of the reasons I’ve had less time and energy for computer archiving. 2023 was my first full calendar year in this role. I hit my one-year anniversary in August! But there’s sometimes a nice overlap between the two efforts. For instance, in 2023 I archived several ham radio related programs for Atari computers and a few for DOS machines and even a handful for CP/M that were rescued from 8-inch floppy disks.

There’s something else, something that I’ve been teasing for years. In my 2018 letter I wrote “There’s a particular archiving project happening in 2019 that is really big and really important for microcomputer history. I’m not ready to talk about it, but hold your breath and cross your fingers.” Then at the end of 2019 I wrote: “That project depends on the help of one person who has been battling ongoing health issues. It is still very much at the front of my mind, and *crosses fingers* will move ahead this year.” It didn’t, and it couldn’t, but with patience and persistence, it’s finally happening. It’s already started, and I can’t wait to have something amazing to show you in 2024. Keep holding your breath and crossing your fingers just a little while longer.

If you support my archiving work on Patreon, thank you! Also please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Internet Archive, the non-profit online library that hosts all of my scans and interviews.

Greetings from the tail end of 2022. This is my annual letter summarizing the computer history work that I did this year.

When I wrote last year’s letter, I was in a bit of a funk. I wrote:

I doubt I will be as productive in 2022 as I was in 2021 … I can’t predict how much energy I will have to devote to these projects in 2022. I need a break from so many interviews (each is more time-consuming than you might guess), and spending hours processing piles of scanned documents does not appeal to me at the moment.

In retrospect, I was right — I produced less in 2022 than 2021, and I really did need a break from interviews and so much scanning. But 2022 ended up being a fairly successful year for my computer history efforts, some of it in ways other than interviews and scanning. 2023 promises to be at least as productive.

I published just four interviews on ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. There was Tom Zimmerman, who worked in in Atari's Corporate Research Lab on the unfinished AMY audio chip; Anthony Ramos, creator of the type-in game Creepy Caverns and the software for the Parrot audio digitizer; Michael Park, programmer of the Swan and Fujiboink demos; and Scott Savage, who built “Lefty,” a robot that played checkers. All four people gave great interviews!

I’ll certainly continue doing interviews in 2023. I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses, but I will say that with 400+ interviews in the bag, finding people to interview is much harder than it used to be. The people who were findable have been found; the people who were agreeable to an interview have been interviewed. There are still more stories to be told, but the path only gets steeper. Let’s shoot for at least six interviews in 2023. 

I did some solid software preservation work in 2022. With the help of 4am and John Keoni Morris, we preserved the only known copy of Glutton, an unreleased game for the Apple II. 

I digitized the entire library of the Ol' Hacker's Atari User Group over a period of two months and made them available at Internet Archive. That collection weighs in at 1,281 .atr files, or 130 megabytes! My thanks to John Hardie at the National Videogame Museum for lending me that collection. You can find discussion of that collection in the AtariAge forums.

The scanners got a bit of a workout in 2022 as well. I scanned the complete run of ITEC (Information Technology Electronics Computers), a partwork magazine published by GEJ Publishing Ltd. in the United Kingdom from 1983–1984, as well as 11 issues of AppleLink Update magazine. I also found a cheaper way to scan large-format posters, which I used to make hi-res scans of a 1989 Ukraine Computer Exhibition poster and the 1984 Atari Final Legacy poster.

The rest of my output, I can only lump into an overarching category I’ll call Miscellaneous Computer History Preservation:

My pal in the Atari 8-bit world, Sal Esquivel, died in December. I did what I could to preserve his memory by archiving his YouTube videos into a collection at Internet Archive. I’m working with Allan Bushman to create a complete collection of Atari Program Exchange manuals and catalogs at Internet Archive. I put several of the Phoenix Software source codes (preserved by me years ago) up at GitHub for easier access: Adventure in Time, Queen of Phobos, and Birth of the Phoenix.

I edited the videos of the all the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival East 2022 and VCF West 2022, and made them available at YouTube and Internet Archive.

Having finished scanning every issue of Mid-Michigan Atari Magazine and Michigan Atari Magazine, I created a “complete collection” 1000+ page PDF which is either a) very handy or b) will hopelessly choke your PDF viewer.

Russ Walter has been writing and updating Secret Guide to Computers (later renamed Secret Guide to Computers & Tricky Living) since 1972. Currently in its 34th edition, Mr. Walter has kept the book updated as hardware, software, and operating systems have evolved. I worked with him to get as many editions as possible preserved and free to download from Internet Archive. Thanks to the Kahle/Austin Foundation for funding the scanning of those books.

A surprise came late in 2022 when I was offered a role at Internet Archive — it turns out that my years and years of preserving computer history taught me a few things, so now I am Internet Archive's Program Manager, Special Collections. My role is to curate the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. I’m having a great time doing that work. It’s the same sort of work as computer history, in a slightly different, but just as nerdy, field. It takes away from the time I can devote to computer history preservation, but it’s a change that I needed.

But! I’m excited for computer history projects in 2023! Having found the guy who wrote the line “Have you played Atari today?” I plan to publish an article or print interview about him and that famous tagline. I’ll continue filling out the Atari Program Exchange collection at Internet Archive. There are a lot of Apple II and Atari documents in a pile to get online for the Scantastix project. And, as I wrote above, I’ll shoot for six interviews. 

Here’s to a productive and fun 2023. Let’s do this.

-Kay

It’s the waning days of 2021, which means it’s time for my annual summary of the computer history efforts I’ve made in the past year.

I published interviews with 29 people across 28 episodes of ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. Many of those interviews can be grouped into specific subjects that I gave extended attention to. Those subjects were:

The Capital Children’s Museum and Interactive Picture Systems. The museum was home to a large lab of Atari (and later, Apple) computers, as well as the office of Interactive Picture Systems and the “Superboots” software development lab.

Atari Research. I did five interviews with people who worked in Atari’s famed R&D lab.

Atari computers at the science fair. I interviewed three people who, as kids, used their Atari computers for school science fair projects.

Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow — a deep dive into a multimedia school assembly, sponsored by Atari, that was seen by more than a million middle- and high-school students in 1983 and 1984.

Some of the folks that I interviewed still had old source code, which they gave to me and allowed me to share with you. I unearthed the Forth code for Worms? by David Maynard as well as his development notes; three published and two unpublished programs by Ed Fries; and LOTS of Apple II Forth source code — both published programs and their development tools — from Prentice Associates.

In a collaboration with programmer Peter Liepa, I preserved the source code to several versions of Boulder Dash, but I am not able to share them due to German copyright law. (A German company owns the rights to Boulder Dash and still publishes new versions.) Still, it’s good to know that the code won’t be lost.

The media I digitized wasn’t limited to code. Filmmaker Lucy Hilmer generously gave me a U-Matic videotape of The Magic Room, Atari’s 1983 documentary about Atari computer camps, which I had professionally digitized, as well as a folder of production documents related to the film. After digitizing them, I donated all the material to The Strong Museum of Play.

After my interview with Suzanne Ciani, she found an unpublished song that she produced for Atari and allowed me to share it. “My Atari” is a bop.

I also unearthed Brenda Laurel’s Atari research memos on the subject of interactive fantasy, which she didn’t have anymore but were buried deep on a very old, very janky hacker site.

I scanned a figurative ton of material in 2021, even purchasing an A3-sized bookedge scanner for larger-format material. I scanned 83 issues of Home Computer Advanced Course magazine, completing the Internet Archive’s collection of that fun UK publication. I also scanned dozens of Atari newsletters, including issues from Jersey Atari Computer Group, Atari Interface, South Shore Atari Group, Atari Times, Bay Area Atari Users Group, Atari Computer Enthusiasts, and Atari Dealer News. (In a herculean effort to organize my workspace, I donated these newsletters to The Strong also.)

Dan Kramer sent me amazing batches of material to scan. Dan, who worked at Atari from 1980 to 1984 in the consumer engineering group, created the Trak-Ball accessories for the Atari game consoles and computers. He also worked on the prototype Atari 2700 and various other projects. I scanned his Atari engineering notebook as well as the schematics and notes that he had saved regarding the Atari Cosmos, an unreleased holographic tabletop game; the Atari 2700 with radio-controlled joysticks; SECAM video versions of the Atari XL computers; and more.

I continued work on the Scantastix project, adding 310 items (primarily Apple II manuals provided by 4AM.) Those 310 items totaled at least 8,000 pages. I lost count.

Other projects that I completed in 2021:

Copying my back catalog of 450+ audio interviews onto YouTube to increase their visibility and reach.

Creating The Internet Archive Research Assistant (TIARA), a tool for researchers who use Internet Archive.

Processing videos of the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival West and VCF East 2021.

Looking ahead: to be perfectly honest, I doubt I will be as productive in 2022 as I was in 2021. The end of December, and the end of 2021 in particular, probably isn’t the best time for me to write this summary. The short winter days weigh on me. I am healthy, but the lingering effects of wave after wave of covid are draining me emotionally. I can’t predict how much energy I will have to devote to these projects in 2022. I need a break from so many interviews (each is more time-consuming than you might guess), and spending hours processing piles of scanned documents does not appeal to me at the moment. It’s possible that a bunch of exciting new projects will reveal themselves this year, and it’s possible I’ll regain the energy and emotional bandwidth to dive into them. It’s also possible that 2022 will be a quieter year. So I’m making no predictions, setting no goals. I’m going to take things a little bit at a time and see where 2022 takes me.

Thanks to my supporters for joining me on this journey, whatever waves and crests it endures.

It's 2021. Thank goodness. I don't need to tell you that 2020 was a horrendous year. I’m just glad that it's over. Of course, the flipping of the calendar doesn't change a thing, but the new year brings hope that the days to come will be better than the days behind us. The flipping of the calendar won't bring back the 1,800,000+ people worldwide who have died of COVID-19. It won't bring back my friend and fellow Atari historian Curt Vendel, who also died last year. It won't bring back all the hair that I lost due to stress.

But if the flipping of the calendar to a new year is a symbol of hope and renewal, I'll take it. With vaccines being administered and a fascist regime on its way out the door in my country, I am hopeful for 2021.

This is the annual post where I make a summary and self-inventory of the computer history work that I did over the previous year. I set a goal in January before the pandemic hit... and I met the goal despite it. For me, thinking about interviews and scans and archiving is often a welcome distraction from the news and the sadness and the stress. I was lucky. Unlike so many others, my work was steady, my health was great, and my family was safe.If you didn't get the stuff done that you wanted to do last year, don't worry about it.

If you didn't accomplish anything other than just muddling through: Don't. Worry. About. It. You made it through. We made it through. 2021 will be better.

So. My goal for 2020 was to publish at least 20 interviews on ANTIC: The Atari 8-bit Podcast. I met that goal. By the end of the year, I published 31 interviews across 26 episodes.

I got to delve into aspects of computer history that hadn't been explored before, such as the short-lived radio show The Famous Computer Cafe; and Sofcast, a different radio program that transmitted software over the airwaves. In non-radio-related interviews, I talked with Brad Stewart, the founder of Covox; and Mark Barton, the creator of Software Automatic Mouth. In non-voice-synthesis-related interviews, I talked with the creators of Atari Speed Reading and the Atari Conversational Language series. In non-obscure-educational-software-related interviews, I interviewed famous musician Suzanne Ciani, who produced commercials and soundscapes for Atari.

It was, I hope, important work that unearthed stories and information that was not available before. My goal for 2021 is to interview at least another 20 people.

In 2019, I announced Scantastix, a highly-curated set of scanning projects meant to fast-track documents into digital form at Internet Archive. At the end of 2019, we had scanned 4,900 pages of material comprising 83 items. By the end of 2020, the totals were 48,791 pages comprising 653 items, an increase of 43,891 pages and 570 items (!) including many VAX/VMS manuals, Apple II manuals, and Apple, Mac, and Atari newsletters and magazines. This effort is not inexpensive (I hire people to do the scanning) and accepts contributions separate from my Patreon.

In other scanning news, Carol Shaw sent me her source code printouts of Colleen Calculator (an early 9K version) and Atari VCS Checkers rev. A. I scanned them, then members of the Atari community got them digitized and compile-able. At Carol's request, the original printouts are now stored at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Hillel Segal sent me 254 computer columns that he wrote for the Denver Post from April 1985 through May 1990, which I helped get into Internet Archive.

Also, I processed the videos created for the (virtual) Vintage Computer Festival West 2020 and VCF East 2020 shows, and uploaded them to Internet Archive and YouTube.

In playtime news, I created @Atari8BitBot and @AppleIIBot, two bots you can use to run code on 8-bit computers right in Twitter. My buddy Carrington and I finished playing all the Infocom text adventures for our Eaten By A Grue podcast. We're now moving on to Infocom's smattering of graphical adventure games.

I have no news to report on my book about Atari dissertations, updates to Jumpman, or the secret special archiving project. Maybe this year.

Let out a collective breath with me. Here’s to a healthy and productive 2021.

Hot on the heels of the poker game, I wrote a blackjack game for the 10-line BASIC contest. It is also in TurboBASIC XL on the Atari 8-bit, and also in ten 120-character lines. I borrowed the card shuffling code from the poker game, but otherwise it’s all new code.

As always with these short programs, there were some space tradeoffs. In exchange for a wallet/calculating money, I found room to show simple card graphics. I also had to give up the custom character with the cute little “10” character. Instead, “T” represents the 10 card.

Like standard blackjack, it starts by dealing your two cards face up, one dealer card face up and one face down. You can press H to hit (take another card) or S to stand (stop taking cards.) (This version does not support doubling down or splitting hands.) After you Stand, it reveals the dealer’s face-down card and the dealer plays. The dealer follows standard Las Vegas rules: always hitting on 16 or less; always standing on 17 or more.

The biggest challenge was calculating Aces, which in Blackjack can count for either 1 or 11. When figuring the player’s score, it starts by assuming an Ace is worth 1. When the player Stands: if the player holds an ace and counting it as 11 won’t cause the player’s total to exceed 21, it adds 10 to the player’s total. On the other hand, when calculating the dealer’s score, it starts by assuming an Ace is worth 11. If after a hit the dealer’s total exceeds 21 and it holds an Ace, it reduces the dealer’s total by 10 and keeps on playing.

Here’s the code:

My first entry for the 2020 10-line BASIC contest is a poker machine simulator written in TurboBASIC XL for the Atari 8-bit computer. At ten 120-character lines, it qualifies for the PUR-120 category. It is based on the common “Jacks Or Better” poker machine, although I changed the payouts to make it more fun and to conserve space.

The game deals a hand of five playing cards. You can choose to “hold” any or all of the cards by pressing 1 though 5, then press any other key to replace the cards that you did not hold. (Held cards are not replaced.) It then calculates whether you’ve won, based on standard poker hands.

Here are the payouts:

royal flush +650 (real game: 1250) royal straight +500 (not in real game) straight flush +350 (real game: 250) 4 of a kind +225 (real game: 125) full house +150 (real game: 30) flush +150 (real game: 25) straight +200 (real game: 20) 3 of a kind +150 (real game: 15) 2 pair +50 (real game: 10) pair of Jacks or better +5 (real game: 10)

With all the logic for calculating poker hands, there wasn’t room for card graphics. I did make a custom character set with just one special character: a "10" for the only two-digit card. I am proud of squeezing in money though. You start with $50 in your wallet, and the game costs $5 per hand. The game remembers your wallet by poking it into unused memory ($600, the top of Page 6) then peeking it back after it re-RUNs. Because RUN clears all the variables, this uses much less program space than resetting all the variables by hand.

Here’s the code:

Hello, it’s 2020, and time for my annual look back at the computer history work that I did in the past year. I find it helpful to make a periodic checkpoint, and the start of the new year is a good time to do it.

The bulk of the year’s work happened at the scanner. I scanned a massive amount of computer history documents and uploaded them to Internet Archive. This material included source code: the source code Leafer Madness, an unfinished game for Atari 8-bit computers (along with its development notebook); Atari Karateka Development Disks; and the Daisy Dot II printing application.

I scanned 24 issues of Semaphore Signal, an Apple Lisa/Macintosh publication that was published from June 17, 1983 through May 31, 1985; and 37 issues of Pragma and Pragma's Product Profiles, two publications devoted to the Pick Operating System. (The remaining issues of those three publications are in a larger format that requires a different scanner. I’ve already started on these in 2020 so the online collections will be complete.) I scanned Auerbach Microworld volume 1 and volume 2, a behemoth 1986 index of computer applications, systems software, microcomputers, and peripherals. The most popular single item that scanned was the beautiful Fall 1989 NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog.

I discovered and scanned several new old dissertations and theses involving 8-bit computers, including Transversion System - An Apple II to Commodore 64 File Transfer/Conversion System, Assembly Language Debugging Hardware/Software For The Commodore 64 Computer, and Microcomputer I/O For A Real Time Automatic Equalizer using a Commodore 64. (My mini-book summarizing 20 Atari computer-related theses stalled completely in 2019. I hope to finish it in 2020.)

Other unique finds that I scanned included the 1984 Atari Telephone Directory, the Atari Office Supply Catalog and Office Administration Handbook, and Atari 800 - send your student to school with a secret weapon, a rare catalog of educational software for the Atari 800 computer.

It’s one thing for me to find and scan computer history things, but what if we could create an organization to create a repeatable, fundable process to scan tech history material and get them into Internet Archive? That’s what Jason Scott and I are doing with a new project called Scantastix. Scantastix is a highly-curated set of scanning projects meant to fast-track documents into digital form at Internet Archive. It is crowd-funded. Soon after launching the project in 2018, the Scantastix project scanned and uploaded 4900 pages of material (comprising 83 items, including many rare Apple II software manuals.)

In 2019 I mostly took a break from from doing interviews for the Antic podcast. I was feeling burned out, not enjoying the process as much as I used to. As a result, I published seven interviews on the podcast. Most of those came at the end of the year as I was emerging from a self-imposed break. I’m looking forward to getting back to interviews in 2020. I am keenly aware that the people I want to interview are getting older — and with that comes forgetting things, health problems, and dying. I need to get back to these interviews while there is still time. My goal for 2020 is to publish at least 20 interviews.

In addition to the podcast interviews, I got to interview Steve Meretsky about interactive fiction at GitHub headquarters, and participate in a panel at Portland Retro Gaming Expo, titled “Atari 800 series computers: 40 years” with Joe Decuir and David Crane! I was thrilled to be able to participate in both events. I was also invited to write a blog post for Internet Archive highlighting some of the Atari computer history resources that I’ve uploaded over the years — sharing these resources with people who might not be aware of the tech history trove that is Internet Archive.

Last year I wrote about a “particular archiving project...that is really big and really important for microcomputer history.” That project depends on the help of one person who has been battling ongoing health issues. It is still very much at the front of my mind, and *crosses fingers* will move ahead this year.

(Oh, and I’m continuing to play all of Infocom’s text adventures with @Carrington for the Eaten By A Grue podcast (10 games left to go!) The project with Rob McMullen to add new levels to Jumpman has been waiting for him to upgrade his Omnivore project. It should also see progress in 2020.)

A quickie, final entry for the 2019 10-liner BASIC contest: GARDEN.

Inspired by arjanvandermeij's #plottertwitter art "8 bits binary flowers," I wanted to create something similar on the Atari 8-bit. I recently learned how to draw ellipses in my work on Renderiffic, my SVG renderer for Atari 8-bit computers, and learned how to rotate shapes from Bruce Artwick’s book Microcomputer Displays, Graphics and Animation. It was easy to combine the two techniques to draw a garden of elliptical flowers.

The program is just a little screensaver that endlessly draws and erases flowers. It’s not a game, so qualifies for the WILD category of the 10-line contest. It’s only four, 120-character lines in Turbo-BASIC XL. Once I get my 1020 plotter back from the fixit guy, I’ll make a version that draws these shapes on paper.

Use the joystick controller to land your LEM (lunar excursion module) on a moon. Land on one of the green landing pads. The trigger fires the main thrusters, pushing the ship upward against the moon’s gravity. Left/right stick movement fires the side thrusters for horizontal movement.

A control panel shows your vertical speed (indicated by ↓), horizontal speed (→), strength of gravity on the moon (G), and amount of fuel (F). To land safely, you must touch down on a landing area with a vertical speed of 10 or less, and horizontal speed of 5 or less. Flying off the sides or the top of the screen is deadly. Running out of fuel is not recommended.

Each moon is a little different, with gravity ranging from light (G5 in the control panel) to heavy (G20.) Moons usually have one or two landing pads. (Rarely, you will come across a moon that has none! In this case you will die. I’m sorry. Space exploration is dangerous.)

The first Lunar Lander that I was exposed to was Atari’s vector arcade version, which seemed amazing — and impossibly difficult. Later, my dad bought the Adventure International version of Lunar Lander for his Atari 800. (It was one of the few pieces of Atari software that he didn’t pirate.) In that version, the LEM doesn’t rotate. Instead, side thrusters push the ship horizontally while it remains in a vertical position. I did the same in my version.

(That’s where I learned the word “hybrid.” The stats on the back of the box said “Language: Hybrid.” I wondered if that was some programming language I hasn’t heard of; dad explained that the word meant “a combination of two things.” In this case, BASIC and assembly language.)

Benj Edwards wrote a great history of Lunar Lander games that is worth reading.

I’ve wanted to program a Lunar Lander-type game since I was a teen. I’m pretty sure I tried it using shape tables on my Apple IIc in AppleSoft BASIC, and experimented with it in Atari BASIC at some point, but I never could get the movement with respect to thrust and gravity right. I didn’t have the math concepts. But in the past few weeks, with my buddy helping with the math for Bouncy; and reading Bruce Artwick’s book Microcomputer Displays, Graphics and Animation, I now know jussssst enough math to be dangerous with Atari graphics. So I was finally able to create a version of Lunar Lander, and in 10 lines of Turbo-BASIC XL.

For the contest, my program fits in the 120-characters-per-line category. In terms of cramming stuff into 10 lines, it’s some of my best work and I learned a lot. Several times I thought the program has to be done, there was absolutely no more room to squeeze in another feature. Then I’d find a way to do something in fewer bytes, making room for a tiny improvement elsewhere.

My favorite was replacing for-next loops to move or generate data with the MOVE statement, with copies memory around RAM. For instance, I needed to zero out Player (sprite) data. Normally I’d do that with FOR I=P+512 TO P+896:POKE I,0:NEXT I. But — MOVE DPEEK(88),P+512,384 does the same thing with fewer bytes (and much faster.) But I needed to copy from an area of RAM that is all zeros. Where would I find such a place? A newly blank screen is filled with zeros. At another point, I needed a mess of random-looking data for the ship explosion. I started with a FOR-NEXT loop writing RANDom numbers, but ended up moving random bits of data from the Atari ROM into sprite memory. Again, it was much faster and took of less precious program space.  I’m not implying at all that I invented this technique, but I figured it out on my own and it was satisfying.

Here’s the commented code:

My sixth entry in the 10-line BASIC contest is Bomber, a Kaboom! clone. It’s written in Turbo BASIC XL and fits in the PUR-120 category. You need a paddle controller and quick reflexes to catch the mad bomber’s falling bombs. The game ends when you miss five bombs. You earn one point for catching a bomb, and lose an increasing number of points for missing them.

Here's the code:

My fifth 10-line BASIC contest entry is Bouncy, a throw-the-ball-into-the-goal game loosely based on "Cup" by Jonathan Freidin from the 1979 book "More BASIC Computer Games." I have never actually played Cup, but read the sample game and code in the classic red book many times over as a kid.

The goal of Bouncy is to throw your ball into the target (not a cup, but a line in my version, so totally different.) Use the joystick to adjust the ball's initial speed (from 10 to 50 speed-o-units) and angle (from an almost-level 10 degrees to a skyward 60 degrees.) Press the trigger to throw the ball. If it falls into the goal or bounces in, you win. (Hitting the goal from below doesn't count.) If you miss, the goal remains unmoved: you can adjust your throw to try again.

My friend Mitch helped and helped with the hard math. (The math in this game is a lot more complected than Cup's!) The game is just eight 120-character lines in Turbo BASIC XL on the Atari, so it goes into the PUR-120 contest category.

One of the great features of the Atari computers was the ability to redefine the character set. Normally, the character set — the collection of letters, numbers, punctuation, and special symbols that the computer can display — is pulled from ROM, where it can’t be changed. But the Atari had the ability to look elsewhere in memory for the character set. Using that feature, you could create customized characters, put them in RAM, then tell the computer to use your custom character set. With that, you might change the standard letter A into a fancy script A, or into a little spaceship.

Back in the day most of us used Atari BASIC, and you could tell when a game was going to use a custom character set: PLEASE WAIT. When that message appeared, it would mean a delay of 30 to 40 seconds while the program copied the character set from ROM to RAM. Actually installing custom characters was very fast; the slow-verhead was in BASIC copying the whole set around memory. If a programmer was sophisticated enough to write a machine language subroutine, the same job could be done in a fraction of a second. I certainly wasn’t, and apparently neither were most of the programmers who had type-in games published in Compute!, Antic, and other computer magazines.

Happily, TurboBASIC XL has a memory move command, which does same work with the speed of machine language, removing the interminable wait to copy characters around.

Here’s how I set up a custom character set in another program I wrote, Poke Pig:

CH=(PEEK(106)-16)*256:’Define a chunk of RAM under the “top” of BASIC’s memory space. This is enough space to hold the character set. The memory location of the start of that space is put into variable CH.

MOVE 57344,CH,1024:’Copy the character set from its location in ROM (it starts at 57344 and is 1024 bytes) to the space we set aside in RAM. This is the part that used to take 30-40 seconds.

DIM F$(8):’This program only defines one special character, which will replace the # character. We’ll put the data for this character in F$. We need 8 bytes for that character data. Changing two characters would take 16 bytes, and so on.

F$="\E7\DB\81\42\99\99\42\3C":'Here’s the data for the new # character. Here it’s a bunch of hex numbers. In the listing that will be represented by a mess of eight ATASCII characters. The Mini Character Editor program generates these hex numbers (and the ATASCII version) based on your drawing.

MOVE ADR(F$),CH+24,8:’Copy the custom character, in F$, which is 8 bytes, replacing the # character, which is located at CH+24.

POKE 756,CH/256:’Tell the computer to start using our copy of the character set instead of the official ROM version.

So, that mess of hex codes in F$. Each hex number represents one row in the eight lines of a character. Normally I would draw the 8x8 character on graph paper, then convert each row to its binary number, then convert that number to its hex or ATASCII equivalent.

The Mini Character Editor program lets you draw a character using the joystick, see it instantly in the Atari’s five graphics modes (BASIC modes 0,1, 2, 4 and 5), and see the hex code and ATASCII string so you can install that graphic in your own program.

In addition to drawing with the joystick, there are four keyboard commands for manipulating the graphic: H for horizontal flip, V for vertical flip, D to move everything down one line, R to move everything right one space.

When you’re ready to install the graphic in your own program, copy down the hex numbers by hand (there are only 8 of them!) or BREAK out the program and type_ ?A$_ to get the ATASCII version to export into your program. 

Mini Character Editor fits in ten 120-character lines. Because it is not a game, i qualifies for the WILD category of the 10-line BASIC contest. I think it’s my first program to use a custom display list, which I (re?)learned about from the book The Creative Atari.

Here's the code:

Back to my personal theme for 10-liner entries — classic BASIC algorithms. It’s hard to get more classic than Conway’s Game of Life. This simple game/simulation was covered so times from many perspectives in Byte Magazine, Creative Computing, and so on. I used the algorithm as described by Mark D. Niemiec in the January 1979 issue of Byte for my 10-liner.

My program lets you edit the starting playfield configuration, run the simulation, then optionally stop the sim to edit the playfield before continuing. At 80 characters per line, this program would fit in PUR-80, the most restrictive contest category. But after writing it I learned that the contest rules say that the PUR-80 category is limited to versions of BASIC that ship with the computer — e.g. Atari BASIC for the Atari 8-bit line. Since I wrote MINILIFE in TurboBASIC XL, and can’t convert it to Atari BASIC without making it significantly longer, I will submit it to the PUR-120 category. Boo.

My third grade teacher hated me and told my mom that I would grow up to be a serial killer. (This turned out to be inaccurate.) She also taught me the dice game “Pig.” In our class, the teacher would roll two dice again and again. Students would add each dice roll to their score, and could quit at any time. But if the teacher rolled snake eyes, the game was over, and any students still playing were out with zero points.

My second 10-line BASIC contest entry is loosely based on the Pig game. It is a ridiculous self-modifying program — instead of rolling dice, it pokes random numbers into random memory locations owned by BASIC. The player can choose how many random memory locations to POKE for points. The player wins if they quit before the game crashes.

I doubt the judges will like it, but I think it's hilarious. It fits into the Pure-120 character category.

I love the BASIC 10-Liner contest! I didn’t find the time/energy/whatever to enter in 2018, so am excited to write some short BASIC programs for this year’s contest. First out of the gate is Floody Bot. This will be an entry for the EXTREME-256 category.

My soft overarching theme for entries this year is classic BASIC algorithms. Floody Bot started with the kernel of Maze Generator by Charles Bond, which was published in Compute! Magazine Issue 19.

In this game, you play the part of a rescue bot entrusted to save humans from rising flood waters. Touch a human to save them. You must rescue three or more humans to proceed to the next level. As levels increase, the flood waters rise more quickly. Oh, the bot can’t swim.

Once per level, you can press the fire button to set off a bomb destroying everything in your horizontal row. This can get you out a sticky situation. If your bot gets stuck, press START to self-destruct. (If you’ve already rescued three or more humans, you’ll move on to the next level with a new bot.)

Earn points for rescuing humans (lower-down humans are worth more.) Lose a lot of points if your bomb kills a human. (You don’t lose points if flood waters kill a human.)

Let’s look at the code:

GRAPHICS 17:DIM F$(48),A(5):CH=(PEEK(106)-16)*256

Set up graphics screen — graphics 1 with no text window. Save space for strings. F$ is for the custom character set. Array A is for maze generation. CH is the location of the character set in RAM.

F$="\FB\FB\FB\00\DF\DF\DF\00\08\61\B4\D0\66\0B\2D\86\7E\42\42\7E\99\7E\BD\66\3E\2A\14\3E\5D\1C\36\77\80\51\2A\04\80\45\2A\10"

This mess of ATASCII is the custom characters.

MOVE 57344,CH,1024:MOVE ADR(F$),CH+8,40:POKE 756,CH/256

Install the custom characters.

A(0)=2:A(1)=-40:A(2)=-2:A(3)=40 SC=DPEEK(88):

Top of screen memory

DO :'main loop

Set up level:

A=SC+21+(16*RAND(2))

Robot starts in either upper corner

G=0:GG=0:L=L+1:BM=1

G=number of guys to collect. I’m not being sexist. It’s a legacy variable because the humans were originally Gems. GG=number of Guys Got (saved). increase level, you have one bomb

W=16*(L+3)+8:WHILE W>255:W=W-258:WEND:POKE 710,W:

Change the brick color per level.

POKE 709,136 POKE 711,56

Set water and bomb colors.

POSITION 0,0 FOR I=1 TO 23:FOR J=1 TO 19:?#6;"\A1";:NEXT J:?#6:NEXT I

fill screen with bricks

COLOR 161:TEXT 11*RAND(2),15,CHR$(64+L)

draw the level letter in either lower corner in bricks 161=129 (Wall character) + 32 for the correct color

POKE 708,0

Hide character set while drawing maze. (It’s fun to watch but might be confusing.)

Now we get into the maze generation. It was a lot of work to tighten up the tangled original code and make it work without GOTOs, but that’s necessary for 10-liners.

POKE A,5 

place a marker at the maze starting point

MR=1:

MR=1: Start with a Random number. MR=0: iterating 

REPEAT BT=1

BT=0: blazing a new path. BT=1: we're BackTracking

IF MR

MR=do we want a random number to start looking for a valid direction?

J=INT(RND(0)*4):X=J

J=pick a random direction. X=remember our starting dir.

ENDIF B=A+A(J)

look forward to possible next space

IF PEEK(B)=129

is it a wall character? Make it a hallway 

POKE B,J+1

leave appropriate bread crumb for backtracking

POKE A+A(J)/2,0

draw hall character on the even column 

A=B

possible next space promoted to new space

MR=1:BT=0:

we'll pick a random direction to go from here

ELSE

its not a wall, so we can't use it. check another direction

J=(J+1)*(J<3):'iterate 1-2-3-0-1-2-3... IF J<>X MR=0:BT=0

we haven't tested all 4 yet, so look in next direction

ENDIF ENDIF IF BT:

we've tried all 4 directions with no luck. Time to backtrack

J=PEEK(A):

Get breadcrumb on current space

W=PEEK(A-1)+PEEK(A+1)+PEEK(A-20)+PEEK(A+20)=387*(J<5) POKE A,4*W

if there walls on 3 sides, it's a dead end, so draw guy (chr 4) (except on the staring spot: no guy there) else draw hall character (0) to erase unsightly breadcrumb.

G=G+W

G=number of guys to collect

A=A-A(J-1)

change current space to the one pointed to by the breadcrumb

ENDIF UNTIL J=5 

when we've backtracked back to the starting point, maze is done!

IF G<6 :GG=9:G=0:L=L-1:LOOP:ENDIF

If the maze generated fewer than 6 people, it's not good, give up and create another. This is hacky but oh well.

POKE 708,26

Reveal character set

We’ve finally built the screen, now we can play the game!

WL=23:'initial water level C=100-L*10:'countdown before water first appears.

C=C+(25-C)*(C<25)

Tidy way of doing C<25 then C=25

REPEAT POKE A,3 PAUSE 5

The actual game loop. Draw the bot. Pause to slow the game down a bit. J=STICK(0) B=A+(J=7)-(J=11) B=B+20*((J=13)-(J=14))

Potential new bot position based on joystick input.

IF PEEK(B)=0:POKE A,0:A=B:SOUND 0,99,6,8:SOUND:POKE 77,0:ENDIF

If that position is empty, move the bot to new position and make a little tick sound. Also defeat attract mode.

IF PEEK(B)=4:G=G-1:GG=GG+1

If robot touched a human, there’s one less human waiting to be saved. Increase counter of humans saved on this level.

S=S+L*((A-SC) DIV 20)

Increase score. Higher levels and deeper humans increase score more.

POKE A,0:A=B:POS.0,23:?#6;S;" ":SOUND 0,60,10,8:PAUSE 5:SOUND ENDIF

Erase human, update score display. Make a happy sound. 

IF PEEK(53279)<7:POKE A,2:SOUND 0,99,8,8:PAUSE 10:SOUND:EXIT:ENDIF

Press start to self-destruct. Make a sad sound, draw dead bot. Level over.

IF STRIG(0)=0 AND BM

If player pressed the fire button and has a bomb available...

BM=0

Used up the bomb.

Y=SC+20*((A-SC) DIV 20):

Compute player Y position. 

FOR W=-1 TO 0:

Drawing routine twice: first draw bomb fire then erase it

FOR X=1 TO 18:SOUND 1,50+X,8,8

up to 18 fire characters in either direction, with changing noise

FOR I=0 TO 1

iterate for left and right sides

IF I

don't extend past left edge

B=A-X

player screen position minus offset

J=B>Y:ELSE:B=A+X:J=B<Y+18:ENDIF

don't extend past right edge

IF J

IF PEEK(B)=4:G=G-1:S=S-25*L:POS.0,23:?#6;S;" ":SOUND 0,250,10,15:ENDIF

Aw, you're blowing up a human. There's one fewer guy onscreen. Lose points. Update onscreen score. Boop noise.

ENDIF POKE B,W*-194

draw, erase splody. chr=194, erase=0

ENDIF NEXT I NEXT X NEXT W SOUND ENDIF

Wrap up loops.

IF C<1:WL=WL-1

Time to raise the water level? Raise it.

C=60-5*L

countdown till it rises again. 

C=C+(10-C)*(C<10)

Maximum speed (IF C<10:C=10)

Next, draw water and make water sound:

FOR X=0 TO 18 SOUND 1,36-X*2,8,8 Z=SC+WL*20+X

Reduce guy count if it flooded a guy:

IF PEEK(Z)=4:G=G-1:SOUND 0,200,10,15:POKE Z,69:ENDIF 

IF PEEK(Z)=0:POKE Z,69:ENDIF

Draw flooding over guys and hall (but not walls)

NEXT X SOUND ELSE C=C-1:'tick down the timer ENDIF UNTIL G=0

Keep doing this until no people left onscreen.

IF GG>2 LOOP ENDIF

If 3 or more people saved, move on to next level.

POS.0,23:?#6;S;"   GAME OVER" WHILE STRIG(0):WEND:RUN