Oenofile

1985

Available

English

ZX-Spectrum 48K

1

Ian recalls: "It was designed to help people choose wine from the Peter Dominic range to go with different types of food. I saw it as a really useful sales tool, they saw it as a publicity gimmick. It was pretty clever actually, though with hindsight I think I'd have written it differently. It was never offered for sale. Had I stayed in the UK, I think I'd have developed it for the PC (which was just beginning to be affordable at the time) and tried to develop its sales to supermarkets generally. I did have interviews with people like Sainsburys, Tescos, etc, but they couldn't take something that ran on the Spectrum seriously. A shame.
Oenofile (which is the name I orginally gave it and is a nice play of the word "Oenophile" - a wine lover) had a clever little routine which would flip the colours of the border about 30 times an interrupt so that it would show up in alternate blue and black horizontal stripes. Completely useless of course, but pretty. I called it as a subroutine whenever the program was awaiting a keypress."

SPOT: wine selection