Your own lost software

[Dr beep]

So I was wondering: what kind of software did you write and got lost.

I for myself have 4 programs:

48KRAAK
A cracking utility I wrote in 1986 or so. I rewrote a version now available, but the original with screen$ is lost

CROSSWORD
A crossword game where you could fill a crossword and after filling add descriptions and save the puzzle to be solved by others.

FUN BASIC
A BASIC where each comnmand gave a silly error, like INK 3 would return in all colours O: INKPOT FELL OVER MESSAGE 0/1

UDGDESIGNER
A BASIC UDG-designer in BASIC using the VAL("BIN "+A$) to make BIN to DECIMAL.
Written to be used on the BASIC-emulator for the C64

[p13z]

Pretty much everything over the years.
A lot of mostly-BASIC games written as a kid - which I still have hope of re-discovering in a family members' loft one day.
(only three games that were really "finished" - and around a thousand loading screens, UDG sets and main menus).
Recently realised that I've lost track of all my "modern" Speccy stuff too, including my old Spectranet/TNFS server contents - and the beginnings of a few games

[patters]

When I first discovered emulators and decided to digitise my old efforts, most of my programs were on a C15 tape. I guess with the jolt of being rewound so many times the tape had slightly stretched and it meant that the very first program wasn't readable by the WAV to TAP converter I used at the time. Stupidly I didn't keep the initial WAV captures, nor the cassette itself (what an idiot). I'm sure it would have been readable now by adjusting threshold values, or maybe the utilities are better. I lost the only game I really bothered to finish, a very crude space invader type thing.

On an unrelated tangent, my other really annoying such loss was a game I wrote over a long time through boring lessons at school on my TI-82 graphic calculator. It was quite an elaborate blackjack game that actually drew the cards in the player's hand with tiny graphics for the suits and stuff. I left the calculator for too long without changing the batteries and the program storage was in volatile RAM not flash memory. Ouch. Of course I discovered this when I found that it was possible to dump the programs to a PC via a serial port.

[patters]

...and around a thousand loading screens, UDG sets and main menus

Haha, funny how every kid always thought: I'm gonna make a game, ok I'll spend ages designing the 8x8 graphic characters first. The really important stuff. Then lose interest.

[8BitAG]

Oh, I have so many lost text adventures... but it's quite fun trying to recreate them from the old notes and scribbles that survive.

[TMD2003]

There's one that I planned to work on this year, but if I'm unlucky, will be most forever.

In preparation for hosting the CSSCGC and throwing it open to other machines (which so far has generated about as much interest as a five-hour lecture on 16th Century crop rotation, to my great annoyance) I'd started converting Ian Collier's 1996 CSSCGC version of Hi-Q Einstein for the QL. Here's a screenshot of the original:



I knew I could use the QL's graphics commands to draw the game screen, and have it in a split-screen format with two windows, one for the text input, one for the game, even in the lower-resolution Mode 8. So I managed to get it as far as selecting the game cards and displaying the initial game status:



Because the members of the QL Forum are really, really opposed to such Spectrum-isms as GOTO and GOSUB statements, I found that even translating the simplest routines in the game was phenomenally hard. Ian Collier's code - bog-standard BASIC though it is - is very convoluted and puts lots and lots of decisions and conditions in the same IF statement, only to end it with a GOTO or GOSUB that I will be thrown off the QL Forum for daring to use. Even the one subroutine that was entirely self-contained wouldn't fit neatly into a QL Forum-approved DEF PROC as it has three different outcomes, all of which were the result of complicated calculations.

And then there was the further complication that the status of the pegs and rings on the Spectrum version was checked via ATTR of the PRINT AT position, which would need converting into extra arrays on the QL.

In the end, I decided there was no way I could get it finished by the end of 2020, and other priorities (such as getting Big Clive's Supergayrainbow Exploding USB Power Supply Game finished instead) took over. Now, I have a hard disc that won't play ball any more, which might or might not be recoverable, and if it can't be recovered, everything I wrote so far for the QL conversion of Hi-Q Einstein will go down the swanee and I will almost certainly not restart it, because second time round I will know it's a project that would be treacherously difficult to finish.

[Manu128k]

When I was a teen, I started working on a Prehistoric Isle ZX Spectrum port (in BASIC). Just a few months ago I rediscovered it. I didn't code a thing beyond the game menu. The menu was pretty cool, though.

Also, a friend and me spent some months creating another BASIC game inspired by Football Manager. I've also recovered it but it has a lot of bugs or unfinished features. Maybe I could rebuild this one some day.

[PaulJ]

Ooo a lot of good stuff.
I have 95% of my BASIC games (and hand drawn inlays) from 83 onwards. Where it went wrong was went I bought a Microdrive. I then stored all my stuff on those, and when I sold it.. they all went. I didn't think I would need them again!

The things I can remember..

1. ADAPT - Advanced Design And Planning Tool. Kitchen design program. Worked on percentages with line drawings and standard sized units. Would love to get that back - but no hope at all. Was going to try and sell it to a company near where I lived.

2. The Hole - my BBS running on twin Microdrives. Another gem I would love to get back.

3. The Lost City - A text adventure (I think in multiple parts). I have the hand drawn maps and can vaguely recall the locations. It was a game with weird undertones. As an example you started on a triangular shaped grassy patch that smelt vaguely of fish. (think about it!) Childish I know, but fun in the day..

[Ast A. Moore]

Oh, yeah. I lost a lot of my early efforts. The prototype of Yankee written in BASIC was about the only survivor (but then, an early version with no graphics and other assists surviving). I also was able to dig out a few stray loading screens and a menu animation written in assembly (with no source code).

The culprit of the archives being lost is that during one house move I (apparently) threw out virtually all of my Speccy tapes. Who could have thunk I’d ever need them again, huh? (Seriously, who thought back in the day we’d still be coding away for the Speccy thirty-odd years later?)

[TMD2003]

The culprit of the archives being lost is that during one house move I (apparently) threw out virtually all of my Speccy tapes. Who could have thunk I’d ever need them again, huh? (Seriously, who thought back in the day we’d still be coding away for the Speccy thirty-odd years later?)

I ditched a load of record-it-yourself tapes as well, as far back as 2000, also for a house move. However, one survived, and from that tape, Jackpot 3 was rescued for the 2004 CSSCGC...

...nothing else was worth it, mind!

[Turtle_Quality]

I've moved house too many times and not sure where most of my original hardware or tapes are, a lot of stuff went AWOL

A blackjack game written in basic with UDGs for suits and royalty where the computer played and made insulting comments to human players

A very difficult and noisy lunar lander written in compiled basic with assembly sprite and screen wipes.

A game called Acid Hop written in Basic that I was always struggling to save on my Issue 1 because of overheating. For some reason the player needs to cross an Acid Marsh (surrounded naturally by an electric face) to get to the exit, without stopping in one place too long and also avoid the (presumably acid proof) hungry crocodile

My compiled version of Football Manager

A very noisy Columns game written in compiled basic

The snooker draw shuffler that would swap names on screen to generate the draw for our monthly snooker tournament.

There was a Disciple menu screen that would list games on a disk and let you select by joystick which one to load. Think I spent more time on the popup picture ( a large disk with a Dr Martin boot on it) than the program

[R-Tape]

(I've mentioned this before but) My brother made a BASIC game called Y.T.S., and he drew an inlay similar to Everyone's a Wally. You were a 2 UDGs high sprite on a YTS scheme, apparently on a farm, moving buckets of swill from left to right, avoiding the mounds of dung. It was punctuated by long BEEPs from a classical tune. It's all a bity hazy, and it's surely lost, but I'd love to see the game or inlay again.

A game called Acid Hop written in Basic that I was always struggling to save on my Issue 1 because of overheating. For some reason the player needs to cross an Acid Marsh (surrounded naturally by an electric face) to get to the exit, without stopping in one place too long and also avoid the (presumably acid proof) hungry crocodile

I hope that fence was FLASHing, otherwise it could be neither electric nor radioactive. This game has CGC written all over it - you should recreate it!

[RubberKeys]

My brother wrote 2 games -
1.Jump Jockey
2,Over The Sticks
Both horse racing games, sent them off to D&H Games and heard nothing back!

[TMD2003]

A game called Acid Hop written in Basic that I was always struggling to save on my Issue 1 because of overheating. For some reason the player needs to cross an Acid Marsh (surrounded naturally by an electric face) to get to the exit, without stopping in one place too long and also avoid the (presumably acid proof) hungry crocodile

I hope that fence was FLASHing, otherwise it could be neither electric nor radioactive. This game has CGC written all over it - you should recreate it!

Yes, you should...

...on the SAM Coupé!

[patters]

For some reason the player needs to cross an Acid Marsh (surrounded naturally by an electric face)

I hope that fence was FLASHing, otherwise it could be neither electric nor radioactive. This game has CGC written all over it - you should recreate it!

My thoughts entirely

[R-Tape]

Yes, you should...

...on the SAM Coupé!

I very nearly added a similar caveat! (QL)

(though make it on the speccy if nothing else)

[R-Tape]

Even if we don't remake these games (and maybe we should!), any chance of some screen mockups?

This is about all I can remember of my bro's game YTS:



The one I can imagine least is [mention]PaulJ[/mention]'s kitchen designer!

[druellan]

I was fortunate enough to get a Disciple disk drive and to preserve most of my tapes, but my first silly incursions in basic are for sure lost, among everything ZX81 related.

But what I really miss are a couple of animated screens made using the educative software Ranch https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4 ... trum/Ranch

I remember specially working on a scene with a couple of farmers at night, looking to a forest fire in the distance.

[Turtle_Quality]

I hope that fence was FLASHing, otherwise it could be neither electric nor radioactive. This game has CGC written all over it - you should recreate it!

Sorry no flashing, I think the electric fence was just a line of bright cyan hash symbols # on black background. But if you touched the fence there would be blue and cyan border stripes and a low buzz sound (a for next loop containing OUT 254,5:OUT 254,17)

I also found a series of quite short beeps of random pitch made a satisfying "frying" sound for when the player sinks into the acid.

For the other way of dying, I didn't figure out a way to recreate in basic the sound of being eaten by a crocodile.

[Turtle_Quality]

Forgot to mention one essential feature, my games would always contain "Hit any Key to continue", or "Bash any Key" or similar. One of my school friends and fellow spectrum owners had the surname "Key", and frequently need to dive for cover when that text appeared. I suspect very few developers realised how much bruising they had caused in this way

[catmeows]

1-Snake game with three levels. Each level consisted of brick wall and poison flakes as hazard, dirt and food as consumable items. Goal was to consume all food to progress to next level. It was written in Basic with UDG and was quite playable.
2-Frogger clone called Freddie (nod to game I played a lot at the time) and you had to cross busy road and avoid cars. It was written in Basic and used UDG. The street was animated by using single string variable. It was quite slow.
3-KGB, a game about interrogation of prisoners. It was choice based game where you could drown people in sink, burn them by a cigarette etc. There were three prisoners, each with own stats and prone to different "negotiation techniques". My friend wrote all the logic (so it is rather his game). I added graphics like prisoner portraits indicating progress (happy, nervous or beaten prisoner), menus, scrolling text in main screen etc. Fun fact - there were no innocents, you always had to break prisoner. Well, thats how it is going in KGB's dungeons, I guess. It was first game I used some machine code in it.
4-Double Dragon Redux prototype. It had its own problems like missing support for platforming and I have never resolved how to fit huge number of sprites and background tiles into memory at the same time but one could build a Renegade type beat'em up in it.

[Turtle_Quality]

I hope that fence was FLASHing, otherwise it could be neither electric nor radioactive. This game has CGC written all over it - you should recreate it!

Recreation underway, with some help from BasinC.

[R-Tape]

3-KGB, a game about interrogation of prisoners. It was choice based game where you could drown people in sink, burn them by a cigarette etc. There were three prisoners, each with own stats and prone to different "negotiation techniques". My friend wrote all the logic (so it is rather his game). I added graphics like prisoner portraits indicating progress (happy, nervous or beaten prisoner), menus, scrolling text in main screen etc. Fun fact - there were no innocents, you always had to break prisoner. Well, thats how it is going in KGB's dungeons, I guess. It was first game I used some machine code in it.

Interesting, if a little scary! Would this have been a new genre for the Speccy? I've googled and found a few modern games like "You will be deceived", but nothing in the archive.

[MarkRJones1970]

Luckily I kept all the tapes that had stuff made by me. I kept them for 25 years, got them all digitially preserved (it's all on WOS) and then LOST the tapes. God knows what I've done with them. Either the person I sent them to to get preserved didn't send them back to me (which was 10 plus years ago now so I've forgotten who it was) or they did send them back to me and I've put them in a 'safe place' but have forgotten where that place was. I look for them every now and again but have had no luck so far!

At least I lost them AFTER all the unique stuff was saved! It could have been worse...

[PaulJ]

The one I can imagine least is @PaulJ's kitchen designer!

OK.. From my very old memory... I think it was something like this...