Miscellaneous Type-Ins

[livorno]

Hi,

Here are approximately 20 miscellaneous type-ins from the *MOST WANTED GAMES* list for which I could not find .BAS downloadables in Atarimania search.

Included in the zip is a tab-delimited manifest.txt file which charts the Titles, Authors, Filenames, Genres, Source magazines, and Dates.

Here are some comments about the games:

1. Swag by Grahame Fairall in Your Computer, January 1984, is probably the star of the bunch. This simple maze game has two enemies - a guard and a dog - to stop your bagman from chasing the key, unlocking the loot, and transferring it to the safezones. The technique of rapidly changing character sets creates the illusion of many animated sprites. In two parts SWAGA.BAS to change the character set which runs H1:SWAGB.BAS (Original used C: You may have to modify the drive in SWAGA.BAS according to your setup) containing the game loop.
2. World Quiz by H.P. Lord in Your Computer, June 1984, is a geography game that spends a lot of time drawing and highlighting a map of the world and then asking 10 geography questions. WRLDQUIZ.BAS.
3. Short Life by Barton Bresnik in Atari Explorer, Sept/Oct 1988, recreates the late John Conway's Game of Life using machine language. SHORTLIF.BAS.
4. Bomby by Norman Thornton in Atari Explorer, Sept/Oct 1988, is supposed to be action-packed, but I could not get it to work despite an accurate checksum. The BASIC program writes an 8K machine language program into AUTORUN.SYS for boot execution, but it just hangs my Altirra no matter what configuration I pick. Someone much more skilled and talented could probably debug the machine language. Norman Thornton commented on Atarimania's guestbook in 2009. BOMBY.BAS and Bomby.atr.
Now comes a half dozen games from QUE Corporation's graphic novel/type-in book "Timelost - A Computer Adventure". The programmer is listed as Joseph Giarratano. I grouped these six BASIC games into an Timelost.atr image. I cleaned up some of the stray cursors using POKE 752,1 and also changed the controls from the less-than/greater-than keys to arrow keys.
5. Battle at Stonehenge is a simple shoot em up with player missle graphics. STONHENG.BAS.
6. Attack of the Slime Creatures shoots sideways, and the slime winks in and out of existence. SLIME.BAS.
7. Peril of the Pitdemons redefines characters into a downward shoot em up in Graphics 0. PITDEMON.BAS.
8. In the Caverns of Carnage redefines characters again in Graphics 0. I found the gameplay unfair trying to navigate a double-wide avatar with a single-wide shot through narrow passages filled with monsters. CARNAGE.BAS.
9. Escape has you trying to ferry prisoners through twisting tunnels and a sliding door. The original had 100 prisoners, but I changed it to 10. The boat doesn't have forward or back controls so the gate seems unavoidable on some runs. ESCAPE.BAS.
10. Rockfall again has the double-wide character sprite, but this time there seems to be enough firepower to keep enemies right and left at bay while shooting a hole in the avalanche above. ROCKFALL.BAS.
11. Tyburn Tree by Alan Wood in Big K, May 1984, is a hangman/Wheel of Fortune game. TYBURN.BAS.
12. Boxed In by Jon M. Smith in Electronic Fun, May 1983, is yet another 2-player Snakes/Tron game with a twist in that crashing is disallowed and standing still is allowed, but after a set time, the one who traveled furthest wins. BOXEDIN.BAS.
13. Treble Clef by Chris North in Enter, May 1985, is a simple music composer in Graphics 3. North is hailed for his young age at only 15. I found backtracking a little messy so I made a mod with cleaner editing. TREBLE.BAS and TREBLE2.BAS.
14. Fire Safety by Steven Chen in Family Computing, October 1986, is a training questionnaire to test your home fire preparedness. FIRESAFE.BAS.
15. Will the Werewolf by Joey Latimer in Family Computing, October 1986, is just a low-resolution portrait which occasionally changes back and forth between Will and Werewolf. WEREWOLF.BAS.
16. Turkey Chase by Steven Chen in Family Computing, November 1986, is a chasing game. TURKEY.BAS.
17. Wishbone by Steven Chen in Family Computing, November 1986, is a simple 2-player reaction time game. WISHBONE.BAS.
18. Catch IT! by Joey Latimer in Family Computing, February 1987, is a simple Pong-like game. CATCHIT.BAS.
19. Heartbeat by Joey Latimer in Family Computing, February 1987, isn't really a game, just a heartbeat sound mimic. HARTBEAT.BAS.
20. Roman Numeral Converter by Joey Latimer in Family Computing, March 1987, converts arabic numerals to roman numerals and vice versa. ROMANNUM.BAS.
21. Second Guesser by Steven Chen in Family Computing, March 1987, is a simple guessing game where you test your internal stopwatch and try to press the spacebar after a set number of seconds within 0.5 seconds error. 2NDGUESS.BAS.

Enjoy,
Livorno

[livorno]

Hi,

It took me a while to figure out that I/O magazine was Atari Input/Output magazine. Archive.org had a Japanese magazine named I/O that diverted me for a while. When I discovered there were only 5 issues, I decided to read the whole series and type in all the type-ins, not just Math Game and Towers of Hanoi from issue 5. I put 35 BASIC listings on a DOS 2.0S disk named Input-Output Magazine.atr as well as the BASIC listings of the two games mentioned in Most Wanted, namely Math Game and Hanoi Towers from issue 5.

Enjoy,