Wednesday June 14, 2006

I've added another new Sherlock 5.0 image set to the Sherlock web page. This one is ByTheSea, by Andree Gendron. Thanks again, Andree!

Tuesday June 6, 2006

I've added a new Sherlock 5.0 image set to the Sherlock web page. This one is Season's Greetings, by Andree Gendron. Thanks, Andree!

Thursday June 1, 2006

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

Well, something like that. I used to work for Hewlett-Packard, from 1976 to 1997 (has anyone else noticed that it's starting to feel weird to type 19-anything???). One of the early products that I got involved with (by a VERY strange sequence of events!) was the HP-85 Personal Computer. It was a big event in my "formative years", and was the computer for which I wrote most of my earliest games (all of which were "arcade games", otherwise fondly known as "twitch games"). The old hardware is starting to fail, and it's getting harder and harder to keep those old computers running (not to mention the magnetic tapes and diskettes). So...

As a hobby project, in spare moments over the past few years, I've developed an HP-85A Emulator, a program that runs under Windows (although it could be ported to any other operating system without TOO much difficulty), and presents the display, keyboard, CPU, ROM, RAM, tape drive, disk drives, and printers of an HP-85... all in software. Included with the Emulator is a "diskette" containing the HP-85 Games Pac II which contains my earliest surviving computer games: TANK, DODGE, RATPAK, BATS, BULPEN, and ASTEROID. All of them are "arcade games", although ASTEROID is actually very close to a puzzle game in that it doesn't require quick reflexes, and you have to think about what you're doing to achieve the goal of getting a supply capsule from a space ship to a space station (under the influence of gravity from nearby asteroids). Of those games, BATS, BULPEN, and ASTEROID are probably the ones (looking back) that I'm happiest with (for various reasons).

Anyway, for those of you who are not "feint of heart" (the emulator isn't particularly "user-friendly"), there's a link at the bottom of the menu to the left which will take you to the page where you can download the emulator. It's kind of an interesting "trip into the past", and really gives you a feeling for how far computers (and software) have come in 26 years' time!

QUICK INSTRUCTIONS: once the emulator is installed, run the HP85.EXE program in the installed directory. After a few seconds, you'll see a white cursor appear in the black HP-85 display area. The Games Pac II is loaded into the first disk drive by default, so at that point:

1) type CAT and press the ENTER key. This will do a CATalog of the default disk drive.
2) you can use the PgDown and PgUp keys on your keyboard to scroll the display down and up to see what's gotten scrolled off the screen. Pressing SHIFT-F12 will clear the display.
3) on a clear line, type LOAD"ASTER" and press ENTER (or whatever program you want).
4) now press the F5 key to run the program.
5) the PAUSE/BREAK key on your keyboard can be used to halt the running program so you can load a different one.

The DOCS sub-folder has some text files that will help some, particularly the README.TXT and the GamePac2_README.TXT files, and also the JPG file BasicExchange_V2N3_Winter1981.jpg (which has simple descriptions of all of the Game Pac 2 games).

NOTE: you can only LOAD the PROG type files. There are also BPGM and DATA files on the disk, and they get loaded/used automatically by the PROG files.

Journals From The Past...

May 2006
April 2006
Nov 2005
Sept 2005
July 2005
May 2005

Everett Kaser Software
PO Box 403
Albany OR 97321-0117
Phone: (541) 928-5259 between 8am and 8pm Pacific Time daily.
email: everett@kaser.com