On 5/13/2010 1:57 PM, Darren New wrote:

> Yeah, it astounded a friend of mine who was a VAX-head when I hit the
> reset switch on the back of a Kaypro CP/M machine. "Was that an
> interrupt? That was quick." "No, that was a cold boot."

Your Kaypro had a reset switch? Ours only had a power switch. I didn't 
do much with it at the time, but I do remember fondly a game that came 
on it called Ladder, The game was entirely in text mode.

A friend of mine and I both wrote independent copies of the game on our 
respective PC platforms. His was a Tandy1000 mine was a PC-XT clone. 
Interestingly, his had a couple problems:

He double-buffered the screen, which was fine on the Tandy, but due to 
the design of the CGA on the XT, when the program flipped pages it would 
cause interminable snow.

With my version I only erased what changed and redrew it. Flicker wasn't 
apparent. His would keep an empty copy of the background, then draw the 
characters on it.

The collision detection on his version had a minor bug: if you 
approached a block at the correct angle, it would fail to detect it and 
your character would become stuck in that block. Mine didn't do that.

In other ways, his was vastly superior to mine. He had actually coded 
enemies. Mine was more of a puzzle you had to work through.

I wish I still had program... was written entirely in QuickBasic.

-- 
~Mike

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