Arctic Adventure: A lost 1981 TRS-80 adventure game by Harry McCracken(arctic81.com)
arctic81.com
Arctic Adventure: A lost 1981 TRS-80 adventure game by Harry McCracken
https://www.arctic81.com/
26 comments
I remember the same experience with a boxing game for the C64. Why I wound up becoming a coder after that is a mystery.
The Trash 80s were something we had in school, never at home.
The Trash 80s were something we had in school, never at home.
I was lucky in that my father worked for National Mutual (today they're AMP Limited), and so I ended up as the first person in my school to have a personal computer.
Without that, and the encouragement to experiment on the machine, I very much doubt I would have ended up as a programmer.
Without that, and the encouragement to experiment on the machine, I very much doubt I would have ended up as a programmer.
Was it because National Mutual supplied a computer for your father to work on at home or did they have a relationship with a manufacturer?
Both. National Mutual were a major investor in Tandy, at the time. They also expected their staff to take home work, and so supplied every manager with a computer.
Our school had them too, but no one had one at home. We had Apple IIs, Vic-20s, TI-99/4As, etc. Was Tandy just really good at selling into the education channel?
Debugging typed in programs is how I learned programming. Actually understanding the code I was typing in instead of trying to get everything typed in perfect made debugging so much easier, plus I could make my own customizations. I only typed in a couple of text adventures because the process of typing them in often gave away most of the mysteries in the game, which wasn't an issue with action type games.
It was the only practical way to learn programming if you didn't go to college. The manuals for those early micros were somewhere between useless and wrong most of the time, magazine articles (and 101 basic computer games of course).
Somewhat unrelated to that, after I had learned programming and been to University, the most educational experience I had was re-compiling sources for software on Unix machines that weren't quite mainstream. Porting TeX / LaTeX to a Pyramid was super educational, plus a fascinating insight into the mind of Donald Knuth.
Somewhat unrelated to that, after I had learned programming and been to University, the most educational experience I had was re-compiling sources for software on Unix machines that weren't quite mainstream. Porting TeX / LaTeX to a Pyramid was super educational, plus a fascinating insight into the mind of Donald Knuth.
> Porting TeX / LaTeX to a Pyramid was super educational, plus a fascinating insight into the mind of Donald Knuth.
This is very interesting; have you written more about the experience somewhere, or do you remember any more about it?
This is very interesting; have you written more about the experience somewhere, or do you remember any more about it?
I don't remember a lot of details, but from memory the software came on a big reel of tape and you dumped the tar archive off it, unpacked it and tried running the Makefile.
This was around 1988, 1989 and the Pyramid was already obsolete but the organisation had a huge investment in it as a 100 user machine with serial terminals so we had to make do.
First thing was to get the tangle and weave programs running. The header paths and library locations weren't completely standardised and even the function signatures were different between machines. There was no "configure" back then, so it was a case of digging through the the compile and link errors, fixing what didn't work and trying again. Once tangle and weave were running the job got a bit easier until it came to the PostScript output program which was a bit of a law unto itself, but I might not be recalling that part correctly.
Once the tangle/weave steps started working, the Makefile assembled everything and install from there was fairly simple. The bones of TeX were written in an intermediate language and needed the tangle/weave pair to turn it into something functional. To fix my adaptations required developing a passung knowledge of that intermediate language, which was half comments and half expressive code. Once I got my head around it I thought it was fascinating but not terribly practical. Then again, I'm no Knuth and never built anything as cool as a computer type setter so what do I know.
There were a few times that tangle and weave did something weird, but mostly that was my adapted code not working as expected. A few revisions sorted those out quickly.
This must have been right at the tail of that era of Unix though, the Sun workstations were easy to get TeX and LaTex for pre built.
The learning experience of trawling through include files looking for the right functions and adapting calls to make them work on that Pyramid was invaluable as a developer later on, not for the Pyramid knowledge but as an education into unix.
Now of course you can copy and paste your error into google and likely somebody solved the problem already. Back then we had the include files and occasionally usenet. It wasn't necessarily harder to get things done but it required patience and time.
This was around 1988, 1989 and the Pyramid was already obsolete but the organisation had a huge investment in it as a 100 user machine with serial terminals so we had to make do.
First thing was to get the tangle and weave programs running. The header paths and library locations weren't completely standardised and even the function signatures were different between machines. There was no "configure" back then, so it was a case of digging through the the compile and link errors, fixing what didn't work and trying again. Once tangle and weave were running the job got a bit easier until it came to the PostScript output program which was a bit of a law unto itself, but I might not be recalling that part correctly.
Once the tangle/weave steps started working, the Makefile assembled everything and install from there was fairly simple. The bones of TeX were written in an intermediate language and needed the tangle/weave pair to turn it into something functional. To fix my adaptations required developing a passung knowledge of that intermediate language, which was half comments and half expressive code. Once I got my head around it I thought it was fascinating but not terribly practical. Then again, I'm no Knuth and never built anything as cool as a computer type setter so what do I know.
There were a few times that tangle and weave did something weird, but mostly that was my adapted code not working as expected. A few revisions sorted those out quickly.
This must have been right at the tail of that era of Unix though, the Sun workstations were easy to get TeX and LaTex for pre built.
The learning experience of trawling through include files looking for the right functions and adapting calls to make them work on that Pyramid was invaluable as a developer later on, not for the Pyramid knowledge but as an education into unix.
Now of course you can copy and paste your error into google and likely somebody solved the problem already. Back then we had the include files and occasionally usenet. It wasn't necessarily harder to get things done but it required patience and time.
Thanks for sharing! That matches what I've read from other sources. Sounds like an educational experience indeed… a lot of things we take for granted today.
It's on archive.org in printed form @ https://archive.org/details/Captain80BasicAdventures/page/n1...
This is an extraordinary book!
I wish we had the same thing for Python or JavaScript! :D
I wish we had the same thing for Python or JavaScript! :D
> I wish we had the same thing for Python or JavaScript! :D
Try Mission Python - the books assumes you don't know how to program and teaches you Python while building a game.
Try Mission Python - the books assumes you don't know how to program and teaches you Python while building a game.
Oh man. This brings me back to Return to Pirate's Isle. Damn... if you didn't put on your glasses within the first few steps, the whole game did not make any sense!
I had to wait 20 years for the internet and sites that had walkthroughs before I was able to finish that game.
I had to wait 20 years for the internet and sites that had walkthroughs before I was able to finish that game.
Don’t feel bad, it took me ~28 years to get to Earth in Gyruss ;) Lets hope Elon does better.
And on that page is a link to a huge amount of TRS-80 software: https://willus.com/trs80/
The original TRS-80 Model 1 did not implement the lowercase letters of ASCII. Skimming, this was written on a Model 3.
The TRS-80 Model 16 was the fastest-selling UNIX machine of it's time, using Microsoft Xenix on a 68k. Bill Gates mentioned his Xenix sales from time to time in later years.
The TRS-80 Model 16 was the fastest-selling UNIX machine of it's time, using Microsoft Xenix on a 68k. Bill Gates mentioned his Xenix sales from time to time in later years.
There was an upper/lowercase mod available for the Model 1.
> The TRS-80 Model 16 was the fastest-selling UNIX machine of its time, using Microsoft Xenix on a 68k. Bill Gates mentioned his Xenix sales from time to time in later years.
Microsoft in the 1970s-early 80s was apparently pretty amazing: bringing BASIC to inexpensive PCs, CP/M to the Apple II, and UNIX to your local electronics/stereo/toy shop (RIP RadioShack.) Their logo was cool back then too.
I guess it's not surprising then for Microsoft to offer WSL/ Ubuntu for Windows!
We're pretty lucky to have Linux (and BSD Unix) on a $35 Raspberry Pi, but it's basically a (much) tinier, cheaper, and more powerful version of what you could get at Radio Shack in 1983. (Reading the specs, apparently you could add up to 9 serial terminals to it in addition to the built-in console!)
(Xenix could run on Apple's Lisa as well, but the Lisa was more expensive and presumably its primary appeal was the Lisa Office System rather than Unix.)
Shame that Xenix PCs died out in the 1980s, really. I imagine an alternate universe where Apple and Radio Shack sold UNIX/Xenix "workstations" in the 1990s, with LisaOS X and Microsoft Windows for Xenix.
Microsoft in the 1970s-early 80s was apparently pretty amazing: bringing BASIC to inexpensive PCs, CP/M to the Apple II, and UNIX to your local electronics/stereo/toy shop (RIP RadioShack.) Their logo was cool back then too.
I guess it's not surprising then for Microsoft to offer WSL/ Ubuntu for Windows!
We're pretty lucky to have Linux (and BSD Unix) on a $35 Raspberry Pi, but it's basically a (much) tinier, cheaper, and more powerful version of what you could get at Radio Shack in 1983. (Reading the specs, apparently you could add up to 9 serial terminals to it in addition to the built-in console!)
(Xenix could run on Apple's Lisa as well, but the Lisa was more expensive and presumably its primary appeal was the Lisa Office System rather than Unix.)
Shame that Xenix PCs died out in the 1980s, really. I imagine an alternate universe where Apple and Radio Shack sold UNIX/Xenix "workstations" in the 1990s, with LisaOS X and Microsoft Windows for Xenix.
Xenix had competition in offices: most people wanted wordperfect and Lotus 123 and some way to share their files. In an office with a netware or banyan vines server, xenix really didn't have a place.
The netware network stack was tiny compared with a full blown tcp stack to talk to xenix, which used to matter a lot before windows for workgroups. The graphics in a PC were pretty ordinary compared to a Sun or an SGI box, so as a workstation xenix couldn't compete there either.
Anyone read this in diagonal imediately thought of Zack? :)
Could this be ported to the Z Machine?
I got confused with this other Arctic Adventure: https://store.steampowered.com/app/358170/Arctic_Adventure/
Same
Perfect content for #SepTandy!
The TRS-80 was my first home computer. I do vividly remembering typing in the whole of Artic Adventure, cursing that I had made a mistake, and painfully checking over every character to find I had put it in identically.
However, bug-checking a typed program was also a common experience. Most of the BASIC games I re-typed from magazines had unplayable flaws in them, so I did actually manage to get it running... Eventually.