Continuing memory lane.
Thinking even more about the last couple of days posts, I got to thinking about a game I typed in from a copy of Acorn User in January 1984 called The Train Game. It was dead simple, but highly addictive. It generated a random track at the beginning of each game and gave you 5 trains. You had to control the points in front of each train to get them to the required stations to take on and offload passengers and freight. The whole thing ran in 2D and used text-based characters to represent everything. Skip to 2001 onwards and here I am making add-ons for Microsoft Train simulator. It does rather look like 13-15 were the key ages for me in determining what I was going to end up doing when I was "grown up."
The fun thing in finding this out was posting to a BBC users group on the web. I described the game and mentioned that it was in a copy of Acorn User magazine. Within an hour I had three replies telling me it was the January 1984 issue, along with links to disk images of the game that would work in BeebEm - the PC BBC emulator. I also now have copies of all the pages of the code I typed in 21 years ago. Just for the sake of completeness and curiousity then, here is a snippit of how you got a game into a computer in the early 80's.
The fun thing in finding this out was posting to a BBC users group on the web. I described the game and mentioned that it was in a copy of Acorn User magazine. Within an hour I had three replies telling me it was the January 1984 issue, along with links to disk images of the game that would work in BeebEm - the PC BBC emulator. I also now have copies of all the pages of the code I typed in 21 years ago. Just for the sake of completeness and curiousity then, here is a snippit of how you got a game into a computer in the early 80's.
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