Tonight, I made an amazing discovery. I finally located a cigar box full of cassettes tapes containing VIC-20 programs I wrote in 1982 (when I was just 13 years old). I am eager to see what is on them!
Amazingly, not only where the games I remember writing here, but also a number of others I had completely forgotten about (and some I am not sure what they were). The list of programs I wrote includes:
- Brick Layer – likely a Surround type game (like TRON light cycles, which was not out yet).
- Factory TNT – the tape just calls it TNT, though. This was a Kaboom “catch the falling bombs” game.
- Gold Grabber – ???
- Meteor Clash – maybe this is the one I have been calling Meteor Storm all these years. If so, it’s a side scrolling spaceship dodging game.
- Sky-Ape-Er – a Donkey Kong style platform game, based on one I purchased and knew I could write better.
- Space Shot – ???
- Thick Brush – likely a drawing program.
I am very excited to see what these programs were. I also have (very faded) thermal printouts of some of them, though I don’t think I could scan them and OCR them or even read them enough to type them in these days.
Off to find a VIC-20 emulator, and figure out how to digitize these tapes and get them loaded in to it…
Sky-Ape-Er Lives!
Update: I managed to load a few files so far, but most have errors. But, I found two versions of Sky-Ape-Er!
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Nice! Were these written in assembly, BASIC or both? It would be great to see a sample in motion.
I had just taught myself BASIC that year. I had heard of a “monitor cartridge” and had been Show assembly at a C= group meeting, but did not understand what it was. Wish I had started then! If I can remap the code to use keys on an emulator, I’d love to share a video of these crappy games :-)
I am now walking through the old source code and will be posting videos and such when I can. I plan to rewrite the program knowing what I know today and see if I can improve it.
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