Bomb Squad is a clone of Minesweeper, a game that came bundled with Windows. It features 5 different skill levels (the size of the playfield increases the higher skill level you go), and it keeps track of your best score for each level, during each play session. In the game you have flag mines, and expose empty spaces. You attempt to expose empty ones by using button one, and flag a mine by using button 2, on a two button joystick or mouse. Each time you expose a square, it will empty out all surrounding squares that have no mines touching them. If a mine touches them, you will instead see a number (the number of surrounding squares that have mines in them).
This game was release at the 25th Annual "Last" CocoFest in Chicago in 2016. It has a few innovations, compared to other Mine Sweeper games on the Coco:
1) It was released on cartridge, with a custom, 2 color 3D-printed case, with little bomb-shaped finger grips on the sides.
2) It is the first program (other than tech demos) to utilize the new high-resolution joystick routines developed by John Kowalski (and helped by Nickolas Marentes and Robert Gault). This enables you to have full screen resolution on both joystick ports WITHOUT requiring any additional hardware (like the High Res Joystick interface that Radio Shack sold).
3) In conjunction with Tim Lindner, who has produced a small run of Program Pak cases that look identical to Radio Shack's, it was professionally packaged in a proper cartridge box, with a color manual.
John sells this cartridge game for $40.00 USD + shipping, and you can email him here to order it (as well as his earlier Gems. Gems 2, and Soviet Bloc games).
Title: Bomb Squad
Author: John R. Strong
Publisher: Strongware
Released: April 23, 2016
Requires: Color Computer 3, 128K RAM, cartridge ONLY, 2 button joystick or mouse.