Biosphere is a simulation style game, written to run under the OS-9 operating system (which allows you to multitask it if you have a Coco 3). While it requires a disk drive, it is completely keyboard driven and does not require joysticks (make sure your Caps Lock is on, though; it doesn't recognize lowercase commands). The game was quite complex with some nice features; the basic premise is that you are flying a large ship called Arkworld (which contains 200 different species of animals and plants), as well as a genetic engineering laboratory, where you can create your own custom animals and plants by genetically stitching two existing ones together (with cool graphics effects while doing so). Each animal or plant (including the one your are trying to rescue from extinction) has it's own weight, food type (herbivore, carnivore, omnivore with sub-classes) as well as the atmospheric gases it inhales and exhales, and by using certain ones of these to "balance" the ecosystem, you populate the planet in an attempt to save the native species. The 8 icons that the player selects with the arrow keys give different functions (or groups of functions), which include:
Native Animal Colony: Shows the specifications and number surviving of the original species that you are trying to rescue.
Planetary Environment: Lets you view the planet environment statistics (temperature, humidity, etc.)
Animal Manifest/Monitor: Lets you view which animals that you have left on the Ark, and how many.
Plant Manifest/Monitor: Lets you view which plants that you have left on the Ark, and how many.
Genetic Engineering: Lets you genetically merge 2 plants or two animals to create an entire new species (you can make up to 5 of each). Even has a cool animation effect of building the new life from two existing ones.
Window View: Lets you view the planet surface (where you get to see animals running around, plants growing and dying, etc.),
Time Control: Let's you change the speed of the simulation. These range from Normal Time (which is real time), Accelerated Time (where you can more quickly see the effects of the changes you have done to the environment, with it going 1 day every 20 seconds) and Hyper Time, which runs at one day per second. But once you have picked this last one, you are committed; you can't make any changes. You have wait until either the planets living things are all dead, or you manage to stabilize the native colony for 65,000 days.
Archives: This lets you save and restore multiple games.
The game features other niceties like different color sets to choose from , the ability to actually print out most of the information to a printer or file that you can use for reference, and being able to multitask with other programs at the same time (and is a game that can take better advantage of that then most). A very well done game for people who like games along the lines of Sim City, etc.
It should be mentioned that the game is very involved, and the manual is 30 pages in order to cover everything.
One other special note: There is a message from the author (Greg Zumwalt) in tribute to his mother in the binary. It reads: "IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, NATHALIE K. ZUMWALT, PASSED AWAY AUGUST 8, 1985, 2:35 PM. LOVED BY ALL."
Title: Biosphere
Author: Greg Zumwalt (Initial design by Mark Siegel)
Publisher: Tandy
Released: 1985
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 64K RAM.