And that is it for Retrochallenge 10/18
Or is it 18/10?
Anyway, writing a brief closing post seemed to make sense, so here it is.
To start, it was fun!
Yes, some things did not work as I expected, and others where hard, but overall, I had a lot of fun working and playing with my old computers – and emulators when needed.
It was also interesting to look at all the other projects going around, although I will admit that I did not have much time to see how the other participants were doing.
My goal of having 3 challenges may have been a bit too much. Not that I had to run to finish either, but I had to leave my other hobbies and projects on the sidelines for the whole month.
The First Challenge was to get my old Acer 486 laptop and “to install a full DOS and software package, including some games, utilities and productivity software in it”
Unfortunately, the poor thing is more dead than alive now. I’ll try to figure out what went wrong with it, and see if it can be recovered.
The Seconds Challenge was “to write a game that will run in any CoCo, using the low-res graphics mode (64×32) and no more than 16 KB RAM.”
“Hippo Teeth” was actually easy to write. Not having to create the gameplay mechanics helped a lot. I will try to write a version that runs in a 4 KB tape based CoCo, and another with some extra features, not caring too much if it will run or not in a 16 KB machine.
And the Third Challenge was “to look through my old programs, find some that could use some cleanup, and try to update them.”
And did I find some!
I have 10 disk images worth of old programs, and just by looking in 3 of them, I’ve already found 8 games that I wanted to update.
For the RetroChallenge, I did “Aliens”, “Russian Roulette”, and “Super-Catch-it”
It was fun – and a bit scary – to go over my +30 year old code. I really want to go over the rest of the programs, perhaps 20-30, and create a nice set of not-so-bad new-old games.
Perhaps for the next Retrochallenge? Because I will be there for sure!
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