Display of first networked personal computer game returning

From: Alan Greenstreet <aeg_at_paradise.net.nz>
Date: Mon Jun 2 01:28:01 2003

On Monday, Jun 2, 2003, at 16:16 Pacific/Auckland, Sean 'Captain
Napalm' Conner wrote:
>>
>> There was a game for the PET that linked user ports that was available
>> years before the ST came out. It was well documented in Byte
>> magazine.
>> I never bought it because I had only one PET.

>
> I thought of that as well (it was the December 1980 issue of Byte by
> the
> way, and later one it became Flash Attack available on the MajorBBS)
> but I discountd that as I thought it used the serial port to hook only
> two
> machines together; technically that may make it a "network" but not in
> the
> general sense of the word (multiple machines).

I remember a "battleship" programme for the BBC model B from Byte
Magazine (probably a couple of years later though). My uncle (who had a
BBC B) and I with my BBC A sat and copied out the listing from the
magazine, debugged and saved to tape. Upon connecting the two computers
up, by their RS232 posts. we found it didn't work...
Taking the tops off both computers we found the model A had all the
connections for the RS232 cable but no RS232 controller, just an empty
slot. This was a major blow after all that typing. That is how we found
the second major difference between model A and B apart from the 16K to
32K memory increase.

A slightly older networked "game" I know of was written by Roger
Garrett and published in "Interface Age" magazine in the August /
September / October 1977 issues. It was then followed by a
comprehensive book in 1978 (which I have). There is a complete
programme structure for a networked game - rather ambitiously titled
"Star Ship Simulation" and based on the previous 1975 books detailing
the Star Trek Enterprise design blueprints and Star Fleet Technical
Manual. Each computer is one of the main bridge stations; Science,
Engineering, Weapons, Navigation, Communications etc.

I have read through most of the book and it is suggested that the
programme could be written in Fortran, Basic or Machine Code -
depending on the choice of the programmer. I have never seen or heard
of this programme running. Has anyone else come across it?

Alan
Received on Mon Jun 02 2003 - 01:28:01 BST