[Coco] The silient night

[Willard Goosey]

>From: "Dave Kelly" <daveekelly at earthlink.net>
>Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 23:50:41 -0600

>The quietness of the board I attribute to the extreme bad weather across the
>nation.

Bad weather?  Huh?  It's nice here...
>
I spent friday night reading a pair of books I bought in the late
'80s.  They're from the Micro Adventure series.  Book 8, The Big
Freeze, and Book 9, Dead Ringer.  Anyone else ever hear of these?

They're sort of like a "choose your own adventure" book, written in
second person ("You do this.  You do that.") except there's only one
path through the book.  

What makes this interesting is the BASIC programs in the book that
you're supposed to type in, run, and in some cases alter, as "You" go
through the book.

The programs themselves are in Apple II (Applesoft) BASIC, with a
standard set of subroutines that are machine specific.  The machines
that have a "Master List" of subroutines are the Apple II, C64,
VIC-20, CoCo, TRS-80 (model I/III/4), IBM PC & PCjr, and Atari.  For
each program, they also have a section with any extra lines a specific
machine may need.  The CoCo & TRS-80 versions only need CLEAR
statements added.

I'd read the books before, and thought they were rather silly.  But
for some reason I decided to read them "properly", typing in all the
programs.  

It was kind of neat to live for a while in that world, where all
machines speak BASIC, even things like elevators and electric fences
(and androids!!!) Even more interesting that there's apparently only
one type of computer in the whole world, in my case a CoCo, and even
good-guy-spies and bad-guy-spies have to use them. :-)  You need to
get into the bad guy's weather satellite control?  Just list the login
program on the screen so you can figure out the password...

And both the good guys and the bad guys use the EXACT same set of
subroutines.  Same sort of programming style, too.  Enough to make you
wonder, humm?

Anyway, I was right, the books are kind of silly, but I do have a
silly side, and it decided to ACT up, so that's what I've been doing
with my CoCo.

>Dave

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko