4 ms·

At UofIowa we had two interesting home-grown RPGs. One was 'AG' which stood for the initials of the author Alan Guiles. It consisted of modules e.g. AgWild, AgT

At UofIowa we had two interesting home-grown RPGs. One was 'AG' which stood for the initials of the author Alan Guiles. It consisted of modules e.g. AgWild, AgTown, AgFt (fight) etc. Written in HP 2000 Acess BASIC. You had a small text grid printed with your location marked as a '*'. Each module had a different view. At any module you could meet a monster and end up in the 'fight' view, which was a linear scale beginning with the monster at the top and you at the bottom. You could advance, retreat, hit or fire an arrow or spell. The arrows and spells were ranged. You could also Evade and avoid the fight, which didn't always work. There were some other interesting modules like an Inn where you could gamble (blackjack, roulette...). It was single-player but everybody appeared on a top-score screen. It was a big deal to get on the 1st page! I did it once. The other was called 'Wilder' and was done by Jon Sawyer. It stood for 'Wilderness' and was multi-player. You could Yell and Listen and communicate with other online players. Some kind of combat with monsters. I don't recall if you could fight P2P? Have to ask Jon about that. Anyway there were quite a few 'mainframe' games written at about the same time at Iowa - a two-player war game WR12, a real-time Star Trek game labelled 'Begin' (because the login module was called 'Begin') with multiple fleets and three or four kinds of weapon. It still has a fan site! And smaller simple games like Trek3D, TREK1D (a joke), Combat, Patrol and several more. It was a big deal, with students getting access to terminals for the first time and getting inventive.

oilbagz 5y ago
It was 1981, and the first "Computer Age" shop had opened up in my town, a place called Claremont - more of a suburb, really, of Perth, Australia. A lucky place, for it meant there was .. inside an air-conditioned cube .. a row of Atari and Apple computers. Two school-kids are sitting there, tapping away, at something from a magazine. It looks immensely interesting, but they scowl at me as I get closer as if not to interrupt. So I go poke on an Atari, and immediately dislike its membrane. The sales guy, probably only a few years beyond his teens, unlike me not yet begun, grins and nods over at another Apple II machine, newly set up. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I bang away at it "HELLO" this and "dO somehting" this and whatever, until the sales guy swoops in, wangs in a floppy, hits the reset combo and lets me play SABOTAGE for the rest of the afternoon. The next day, after an interminably long day at school, I arrive with a freshly purloined magazine of my own. The same kids from before are there, just minutes before me probably but seemingly there all night, and are having a blast. They proudly, this time, beckon me over to 'have a go' at their game, TREK, wherein I am an "+" and there are "*"'s and . and #'s all over the place. After witnessing me fail miserably, yet nevertheless programmatically successfully, these older kids chortle themselves out into the heat .. and I stick around to learn how to copy it to another floppy disk. The sales guy obliges, and gives me my first 5.4" floppy disk to save things on, "as long as you come back tomorrow and type a few more programs in, from those magazines you kids have..." So, I did. What a summer it was. I'll never forget those older nerds.
- nickstinemates 5y ago
  What an awesome sales guy
  - oilbagz 5y ago
    Yeah, I guess they sold quite a few VERY expensive machines in that neighborhood, and there were raging arcade game controversies going along at the same time, so seeing kids do 'productive' things with computers - like program simulated galactic war games - seemed like a responsible thing to do. In my case, that guy gave me a raging passion for computers that has led, 40 years later, to ridiculous things happening. The "Computer Age" place stuck around for only a few years afterwards .. the cognescenti of my hacker club at school discovered TANDY and Dick Smith as places to test new hilarious routines .. and, meanwhile, some of us got modems. Good times. I think my Mum still had that floppy disk around in her memoirs, somewhere. Something about how she righteously retrieved it from an old, much loathed, school principle, who had zero idea what it was, or what it would ever mean for the world that a 10 year old kid had simulated galactic war games on his person, in lieu of math homework, or so. Anyway, yeah. Great sales guy, would time-travel and witness again.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      It really was the best era, and lots that I can relate to in your story there, though I was on the far opposite side of the world in snowy cold Edmonton, Canada. And re: the principal, here's a great quote from my grade 3 report card which I get a kick out of, and use to help my kids feel better about their report cards: "XXX's work is very untidy. More work is needed in cursive writing. His journal entries are computer programs." I wish I could find that teacher today and send her a copy of my job offer from Google from 10 years ago.
    - nicnic3 5y ago
      I was a teenager visiting Computer Age on the weekends at the same time. It was a time when computer access was still scarce and you hung around shops and went to conventions just to get access to one. Some friends used to go to the tandy store each afternoon after school and type in a lunar lander game they had written on the tandy 100 for sale. Each day the shop would turn of all the machines and wipe the game so they would go back up the next day and type it in again.
paul_f 5y ago
There must have been multiple Star Trek games. This is the one I remember playing. Written by Mike Mayfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)
- skinwill 5y ago
  I have VERY fond memories of that game from 1986. My father who was teaching at a community college in Iowa had a copy of that game running on a VAX11. I recall that to play the game he had to walk to the data center and, inside a cabinet, physically unplug the cable for his terminal and plug it into another port. The connector on the cable looked like a large rectangular multi pin monster. Back at his desk, his green screen terminal was ready to play the game. I was 5, it was very awesome.
- SpikeDad 5y ago
  During college in 1976 I typed in Star Trek: APL using an IBM APL terminal with an APL Selectronic ball. I had a printout I think I paid $5 for and typed it character by character for some time (a couple weeks I think - this was my first experience with an APL hard copy terminal). Boy I played that for a long time. Glad I didn't get billed for the paper I used. So much matrix math. 8-)
daniel_rh 5y ago
Wow you played begin too! I added multiplayer through DOSbox-- it was interesting that the AI craft were just like player craft but had a different controller. It was possible to splice in keyboard input for that. Then I wrote some screen scraping software to send the commands remotely. Here's the software project http://begin2.sourceforge.net/ http://begin2.sourceforge.net/ Unfortunately the sourceforge matchmaking server has long gone offline, but you could connect direct to IP addresses too, so it should still be playable
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Tom would be very interested in that! You should post something maybe on his site? https://www.starfleetproject.com/ https://www.starfleetproject.com/
  - daniel_rh 5y ago
    Ya we briefly corresponded in a mailing list some time back... he liked the multiplayer version, but wasn't interested in opening the source code yet. Maybe one of these years he will--I should reach out again... until them I have some pretty well annotated IDA file
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Wait! The multi-player game by Jon Sawyer was 'Wander'. Don't know how I forgot that.

oilbagz 5y ago

It was 1981, and the first "Computer Age" shop had opened up in my town, a place called Claremont - more of a suburb, really, of Perth, Australia. A lucky place, for it meant there was .. inside an air-conditioned cube .. a row of Atari and Apple computers. Two school-kids are sitting there, tapping away, at something from a magazine. It looks immensely interesting, but they scowl at me as I get closer as if not to interrupt. So I go poke on an Atari, and immediately dislike its membrane. The sales guy, probably only a few years beyond his teens, unlike me not yet begun, grins and nods over at another Apple II machine, newly set up. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I bang away at it "HELLO" this and "dO somehting" this and whatever, until the sales guy swoops in, wangs in a floppy, hits the reset combo and lets me play SABOTAGE for the rest of the afternoon. The next day, after an interminably long day at school, I arrive with a freshly purloined magazine of my own. The same kids from before are there, just minutes before me probably but seemingly there all night, and are having a blast. They proudly, this time, beckon me over to 'have a go' at their game, TREK, wherein I am an "+" and there are "*"'s and . and #'s all over the place. After witnessing me fail miserably, yet nevertheless programmatically successfully, these older kids chortle themselves out into the heat .. and I stick around to learn how to copy it to another floppy disk. The sales guy obliges, and gives me my first 5.4" floppy disk to save things on, "as long as you come back tomorrow and type a few more programs in, from those magazines you kids have..." So, I did. What a summer it was. I'll never forget those older nerds.

nickstinemates 5y ago
What an awesome sales guy
- oilbagz 5y ago
  Yeah, I guess they sold quite a few VERY expensive machines in that neighborhood, and there were raging arcade game controversies going along at the same time, so seeing kids do 'productive' things with computers - like program simulated galactic war games - seemed like a responsible thing to do. In my case, that guy gave me a raging passion for computers that has led, 40 years later, to ridiculous things happening. The "Computer Age" place stuck around for only a few years afterwards .. the cognescenti of my hacker club at school discovered TANDY and Dick Smith as places to test new hilarious routines .. and, meanwhile, some of us got modems. Good times. I think my Mum still had that floppy disk around in her memoirs, somewhere. Something about how she righteously retrieved it from an old, much loathed, school principle, who had zero idea what it was, or what it would ever mean for the world that a 10 year old kid had simulated galactic war games on his person, in lieu of math homework, or so. Anyway, yeah. Great sales guy, would time-travel and witness again.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    It really was the best era, and lots that I can relate to in your story there, though I was on the far opposite side of the world in snowy cold Edmonton, Canada. And re: the principal, here's a great quote from my grade 3 report card which I get a kick out of, and use to help my kids feel better about their report cards: "XXX's work is very untidy. More work is needed in cursive writing. His journal entries are computer programs." I wish I could find that teacher today and send her a copy of my job offer from Google from 10 years ago.
  - nicnic3 5y ago
    I was a teenager visiting Computer Age on the weekends at the same time. It was a time when computer access was still scarce and you hung around shops and went to conventions just to get access to one. Some friends used to go to the tandy store each afternoon after school and type in a lunar lander game they had written on the tandy 100 for sale. Each day the shop would turn of all the machines and wipe the game so they would go back up the next day and type it in again.

paul_f 5y ago

There must have been multiple Star Trek games. This is the one I remember playing. Written by Mike Mayfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)

skinwill 5y ago
I have VERY fond memories of that game from 1986. My father who was teaching at a community college in Iowa had a copy of that game running on a VAX11. I recall that to play the game he had to walk to the data center and, inside a cabinet, physically unplug the cable for his terminal and plug it into another port. The connector on the cable looked like a large rectangular multi pin monster. Back at his desk, his green screen terminal was ready to play the game. I was 5, it was very awesome.
SpikeDad 5y ago
During college in 1976 I typed in Star Trek: APL using an IBM APL terminal with an APL Selectronic ball. I had a printout I think I paid $5 for and typed it character by character for some time (a couple weeks I think - this was my first experience with an APL hard copy terminal). Boy I played that for a long time. Glad I didn't get billed for the paper I used. So much matrix math. 8-)

daniel_rh 5y ago

Wow you played begin too! I added multiplayer through DOSbox-- it was interesting that the AI craft were just like player craft but had a different controller. It was possible to splice in keyboard input for that. Then I wrote some screen scraping software to send the commands remotely. Here's the software project http://begin2.sourceforge.net/ http://begin2.sourceforge.net/ Unfortunately the sourceforge matchmaking server has long gone offline, but you could connect direct to IP addresses too, so it should still be playable

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Tom would be very interested in that! You should post something maybe on his site? https://www.starfleetproject.com/ https://www.starfleetproject.com/
- daniel_rh 5y ago
  Ya we briefly corresponded in a mailing list some time back... he liked the multiplayer version, but wasn't interested in opening the source code yet. Maybe one of these years he will--I should reach out again... until them I have some pretty well annotated IDA file

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Wait! The multi-player game by Jon Sawyer was 'Wander'. Don't know how I forgot that.