Hi to all TI fans!

I was able to "revive" an old tape containing a program I have written with a friend in 1984, when we were 14 years old! We did it in a Saturday afternoon and I remember this work was very exciting!

It was one of my first programs and if you look at the source you can see a nice example of "spaghetti" code due to the TI Basic limitations and our very little experience in programming. However, it's not so "bad" if you consider that it was 1984 and you can find some similar programs done by professionist and sold in the market (do you remember the game boxes that are connected to TV or also the games that are running on the Atari VCS?).

It's a 2 player tanks game with 3 levels and simple B&W graphics (yes, B&W, since my TI was connected to a B&W TV...). The name of the game is "TI-Bomber".

In the disk you can find 2 versions of the program:

 BOMBER
 BOMBER1984

that you can run with TI Basic or Extended Basic. I tested them using MESS V106.


The "BOMBER1984" is not totally my original "1984 version", since I made the following changes before publishing it:

- translation from Italian to English;
- small cosmetic changes to instuctions screen, etc.;
- fixed bug on second player score (incorrect reuse of the same variable for selecting the level and to track second player score);
- fixed bug on characters definition (it worked correctly only if the level 1 is selected first).

Then, I made a "2006 enhanced" (the "BOMBER" file) version that includes the following changes:

- changed the screen color (the default "green" is horrible!);
- changed the level 3 background character using a defined character;
- changed the characters used for printing the boms used by player 2;
- fixed (with a lot of other horrible "spaghetti" code lines...) the bug of crashing the game if a player fires the bomb near to the screen borders. This bug was considered an "extra" feature by me and my friend in 1984, since it added something to pay attention to when playing.



I hope to haven't introduced too much expectations from the game after this long description. The original intent is different and is to stimulate all other TI friends, that are using emulators and still remember the old good days in which they are using their TI, to revive the stuff they have (books, manuals, magazines, tape, disks, etc.) and convert it in electronic format and share on the net. This will help in preserving our old great computer after 20 years!


The code released is free, you can use, modify it, etc. Please, distribute the disk without removing/alter this ReadMe file.
Thanks.

Alessandro Benedettini


Please, if you have looked at the program send me an email to: alexone69@yahoo.it


