Denial

Earlier this year I transferred all my old VIC-tapes to SD-card. Luckily I was able to transfer all of my 25 year old tapes. Good thing I didn't use Turbo Tape.

Back then I typed in a lot of games and programs from several german magazines like 64er, Computronic, Homecomputer and Compute Mit. I'm in the process of filling in the blanks in my magazine collection and the type-ins contained in those magazines.

Now I think I am at a point where I can slowly start to present these programs here for download. Being type-ins the quality is hit and miss, some are just bad, others worth a chuckle, but every once in a while a really good or interesting program is in between there.



I'm gonna start with "Compute mit" magazine which was first released as a weekly magazine in 1984, quickly switched to bi-weekly and then even more quickly disappeared just to be resurrected by another company in May 1985 as a monthly magazine. It was released until August 1988, but the final VIC-20 type-in was in March 1988 - it's a small wonder they held out as long as they did.

It is with those monthly issues I will start to release the type-ins here. I kept the programs as they were released back then for the most part, just changing the two-parters to load from the last used device rather than from tape. Also I needed to fix joystick-support in some programs because of this.

Anyway, here are the programs from issue May, 1985:

http://www.tokra.de/vic/computemit/8505/8505.zip

FLOWERS (unexpanded VIC): Pick up the flowers, but not the ones with bees above them. At least 5 flowers per line until you may go to the next line.



OLYMPIA (unexpanded VIC): Hit return to run, Space to jump

Thanks. Can't wait to see the rest.

Nice! After some attempts, hammering away at the Return key and pressing the Space bar at the right time I got this in OLYMPIA:



Anyone try to beat this?

June, 1985:

http://www.tokra.de/vic/computemit/8506/8506.zip

EINBRECHER (unexpanded VIC): Find the right door to enter the house, then load the next part, get the money bag and return to your car


TANKER (unexpanded VIC): Shoot the purple grenades, catch the yellow barrels


JUPITER RESCUE (unexpanded VIC): Go down the cave as deep as you can, remember to pick up the blue air tanks

Thanks! These games capture the true spirit of early magazine type-ins .

Do these listings have credits, as in who the programmer is? Also, do they work from tape or disk for the multi-part programs?

Often the author is at the top of the listing in REM-statements or there's a splash-screen with the author's name. The multi-part programs were originally done for tape mostly, but as I wrote before:

I kept the programs as they were released back then for the most part, just changing the two-parters to load from the last used device rather than from tape

So it should work with both tape and disk now (using PEEK(186) to find out what the last used device was)

tokra wrote:I kept the programs as they were released back then for the most part, just changing the two-parters to load from the last used device rather than from tape

Ah, somehow missed that above. Good to know...

July, 1985:

http://www.tokra.de/vic/computemit/8507/8507.zip

STUNTMAN (+3K): Find the right speed to jump over the cars. F5 increases speed.


SEPP (unexpanded VIC): Get Sepp home. Keys to use: @:=/


BALLOON SHOT (unexpanded VIC): Shoot all balloons, reload at the top after 5 shots. Keys to use: A Z =

tokra wrote:STUNTMAN (+3K): Find the right speed to jump over the cars. F5 increases speed.

Nice! Car jumping is so 80s.

These screenshots are sexy.

I think they look a little "widescreen streched", I've never had a screen look like that playing on my VIC. A lot of them looks like fun though - should try them out in the weekend perhaps.

I'm doing the screenshots with VIC -> Snapshot -> Save/Stop Media File and saving them as PNG-files. VICE itself is aspect-ratio fixed but the files VICE save are probably not. Is there a better easy way to do the screenshots?

tokra wrote:Is there a better ...

Within IrfanView, I usually crop the border (position and size can be determined from the startup message, unless the game has changed the screen dimensions) - then resize (without keeping the aspect ratio) to 250% horizontal and 300% vertical.

This gives pixel "blocks", which are 5 pixels wide and 3 pixels high. Finally, I shrink the screenshot again to original height (keeping the aspect ratio this time) with Bell filter resampling.

I took that aspect ratio (1.67:1) from a PAL TV set, from which I knew it would show a correct circle with standard test images.

... easy way to do the screenshots?

Not too easy. More like a lot of manual steps, but thus far I didn't bother to write a small C program for this task.

Not too easy. More like a lot of manual steps, but thus far I didn't bother to write a small C program for this task.

Hmm, I'll keep using the slightly stretched screenshots for now. If you want to see the correct aspect ratio, fire the programs up in your VIC or VICE