Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:09:28 -0600 From: "Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen" Subject: Re: Old TRS-80 Color Computer game called "Apples" To: "L. Curtis Boyle" Organization: http://blog.crispen.org/ The voices are telling me L. Curtis Boyle said on 3/30/2005 10:16 PM: Hi. I run the Color Computer game site (http://nitros9.stg.net/coco_game_list.html), and there is a game on there by a Bob Crispen called "Apples" that was made in 1982. Are you the author of this game? If so, can you give me any additional information on it, and would you be willing to allow it to be put up for download, as some other authors have done? If you are not the same Bob Crispen, then I apologize. It is me, and I'd be delighted to have it up for download! Let me know where it's going, and I'll link to it from my free software page. This is wonderful! Here's the story. I wrote "Apples" and sent it off to Computerware in Encinitas CA, and they wrote back saying the graphics weren't good enough, which was true, but I thought the game play was semi-decent, so to heck with the graphics. And besides, making a figure that was X pixels tall and Y pixels wide and multiplying the size of the maze paths accordingly sounded like a boring job that would make the game worse. So I left it that way. Apparently, as I heard from some friends, Computerware sold one or two of them anyway, or perhaps they passed them out to friends. No big deal. They did something similar with the manual I wrote for FOXYGRAF. They sold a bunch of manuals for $10 a crack, and I don't think I ever did see a nickel's worth of royalties out of that. But I got enough money out of FOXYGRAF to buy a disk drive and a couple of other things, and that's all I ever wanted. If you've never heard of FOXYGRAF, I'm not a bit surprised. I call it The Worst Paint Program Ever Written for Any Computer. Ever. The manual was pretty good, though. And best of all, I got a story out of it. It turns out Computerware had another program called SEMIDRAW, which was much better than FOXYGRAF (my manual was better though!) Well, a few years ago I was involved with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) a little bit, and I had breakfast one morning at a Web3D Symposium, and there was a guy (whose name is on the tip of my tongue) who was the author of SEMIDRAW, and he was also into VRML. So computer graphics is a small town. We agreed, btw, that his program was better and my manual was better. Anyhow, if you find FOXYGRAF or the manual, feel free to publish them. I also did another program called FOXYDIS. It was a disassembler, and while it lacked in bells and whistles, it was (a) position independent code, (b) the smallest disassembler I've ever seen, and (c) bulletproof. I used SOURCER(er), which was a very nice program, but I'd love to set up a shootout with FOXYDIS on a sample of code, data, and random cruft, and I'll bet FOXYDIS shines. Of course, as to doing anything practical with it, like writing to disk or printing, I hadn't quite got that bit yet. Anyhow, Computerware didn't want FOXYDIS either, but if it turns out it's floating around out there somewhere, you're welcome to distribute it. I may even have FOXY4TH somewhere on 5.25" floppies, though God knows where or whether the disks are any good any more. It's a FORTH-83 compiler, complete with Forth assembler, an editor in which you could highlight code and step through it, and several other goodies I forget now. Want it? Give me a snailmail address. Or should those things go somewhere else? Btw, I always meant to fix APPLES so you couldn't blow up an apple (or so it would score if you did), but I never got around to it. The reason it does that is that the game board you see on the screen *is* the representation of the game board that I run the rules on. Final APPLES story (boy are you going to be sorry you wrote!): I think there's two good things about APPLES. The second best thing is that you can actually win. I hate games where the best you can do is postpone your death. The best thing about APPLES (imho) is the random maze it computes for every game. I *think* I computed the empty path and then filled in the sides, but I couldn't swear to it. Cute little algorithm, fast too; I wish I could remember it! The algorithm that controls the apple eater eater wasn't anything to write home about -- better than some I'd seen, worse than I wanted it to be. And I vaguely recall there was a way you could select speed, but that's a blur to me now. Glad to see you're keeping the CoCo flame alive! Oh drat! Before I go giving blanket permission, what's your license? I prefer GPL or Apache, but Creative Commons Attribution (BY:) is good too, and if I have to go BSD, I'll do that. If you want to charge anything, we'll need to talk. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Why is a record company any more qualified to send an MP3 to iTunes than I am? - Moby Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 09:37:18 -0600 From: "Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen" Subject: Re: Old TRS-80 Color Computer game called "Apples" To: "L. Curtis Boyle" Organization: http://blog.crispen.org/ The voices are telling me L. Curtis Boyle said on 3/31/2005 7:19 PM: I don't charge anything, ever, for any of these programs once I get permission (don't charge for my own anymore either, since NitrOS9 was released to the public). As far as licensing goes, I don't know enough about the various kinds you listed to give you a proper answer; what I view it as is permission to download, use, etc. but the original author retains the copyright (unless he/she choose to release it to the public domain), so basically, freeware. A lot of my stuff isn't back on a webpage yet since our local Freenet shut down; but if you go to: http://web.archive.org/web/20020802003001/www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~af960/ has a lot of my free stuff and development efforts. I am not making a page for anything other than games at the moment; however,if anyone has them, there are other webpages that may put them up for download. I never used your version of Forth; I briefly used the Hoyt Stearn Electronics version. It was undoubtedly better than mine, since my knowledge of how vocabularies worked was murky at best. Do you remember what's supposed to happen when you type FORTH WORDS? Did you want a copy of Apples, ready for an emulator, once I find it again and put it on the site? Yes, please. And the way you distribute the programs is great. No license problems from me at all. After I sent the message last night, I realized the GPL would require me to distribute the source code if asked, and since "distribute the source code" begins with "*find* the source code", I'd be screwed. Thanks very much for your site, and I'm looking forward to playing some of the games. -- Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen bob at crispen dot org Ex Cathedra Weblog: http://blog.crispen.org/ Why is a record company any more qualified to send an MP3 to iTunes than I am? - Moby