Subject: For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

OK, here's a link to a blog page which for those among us that remember what BASIC is relationship to computer programming... you may find this a bit interesting as a Doctor Who fan:



Chaucery Blog: Doctor Who's very special effects



Cheers,

Louis

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

If you really want to get on the Way Back machine, then try the first ever Doctor Who computer game! Atari 400/800 and joystick not included?!?

Taras

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

[QUOTE BY= tarashnat]
If you really want to get on the Way Back machine, then try the first ever Doctor Who computer game! Atari 400/800 and joystick not included?!?

Taras[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the link.

I still have my Atari 800 computers... but I don't recall playing this particular one. Interesting. There was one released for the Atari ST which (obviously) has far superior graphics than this one... This one here looks more like the Atari 2600 game console graphics than the 400/800 computer line.

Cheers,
Louis

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

It would be interesting to see if you could get the code to your Atari without having to re-type it from the source. I remember back in my the Apple ][+ days spending quite a few hours typing basic and machine code programs from the magazines of the day. Typos were often annoying, and sometimes next to impossible to find, especially in the hexadecimal machine code. Those were the days...

Taras

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

Oh I remember doing the same... typing in the code from magazines and running it. It is crazy now that you look back on it... but that was one way software was delivered back in the day.

I am not even going to bother tying to get the code for this Doctor Who game in the machine.. Too much trouble, too little results. It will be quicker to just use emulator software on the Mac if needed.

Though now that I think about it... I have an old Atari 130XE which actually has an external 3.5" floppy drive... So if I downloaded the code, then brought it to old Mac with a floppy drive, put it on a DOS formatted disk and then used a utility to read DOS disks on the Atari, I think I could probably transfer the code to that system. But I have not booted that system up in years. I used to run a BBS on it, so I had hard disks attached it as well.

Now I wish it was that easy to get all the old material on that computer platform that was done for the Gallifreyan Embassy newsletters... all the interviews and such. All the text are in a proprietary word processing format and I don't recall if there was any option to save out in plain ASCII or not. I doubt it.

Cheers,
Louis

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

I remember using AppleWriter ][ on an Apple ][+ and WordStar on a PC XT clone to type out articles for a student journal and shrinking the print optically on a xerox machine before going to manual layout and finally graduating to a Macintosh II with QuarkXPress for layout. Was I ever glad to be done with rubber cement and Xacto knives! Well, I never completely got away from those...

Recovering old articles from those newsletters sounds like a worthy project. Sleep is for tortises, right!?!

Taras

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

Same here Taras... Before going into DTP (Desktop Publishing)... I did the the old traditional way of pasting up layouts. I had no regrets going to computers for this task.

Back in the mid-80's... what I would do for our Doctor Who newsletters was to output the type setting with my old classic Atari computers... which I then cut and pasted on a physical layout board before having it mass produced. Outside of the typesetting of the articles themselves (the text columns) everything else was traditional hand paste ups.

One of these days I will have to archive those old issues here on the web site some how...

Cheers,
Louis

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

This certainly reminds me of my Commodore 64, and the hours I spent playing games...Impossible Mission, Lazy Jones, Wizard, Alice in Wonderland. I didn't have much Who software...actually, the only ones I can recall are some SIDs of the theme and a GEOS font based on the McCoy logo. But I can recall cooking up some sprites of the TARDIS in HesSoftware's GraphicBASIC.

Although I never did layout the manual way, my first real design job out of college was at a studio that had been in operation for 30+ years. I was pretty impressed by all the old mechanicals they had. It looked like it was a lot of fun, especially when I realized that none of them ever crashed during a save.

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

It never ceases to amaze me how something you did for fun years ago comes back to remind you of it much much later.

In 1983 I got my first Commodore 64. In 1987 I won a GOES Desktop Publishing competition, with a 7 page comic book. One of the prizes was the entire line of GEOS software including geoPublish, and with geoPublish I used to do the Computer Club newsletters.

And I recall doing one Doctor Who newsletter. For it I needed a Doctor Who font.

My Doctor Who font was based on the McCoy logo.

DoctorW, the font you referred to was created by me sometime in 1987 or 1988.



http://sean.adventureteam.com/pages/geos/whofont.htm


On the C64 front, I recall a Doctor Who game featuring Colin Baker, but I could never figure out how to play it.

I still have it on a Commodore 64 emulator...

Sean.

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

[QUOTE BY= seanhuxter]DoctorW, the font you referred to was created by me sometime in 1987 or 1988.[/QUOTE]

Wow...it's a small universe. Well, I've wanted to say this since I first saw your work in Dick Estelle's Font Resource Directory...Good Job!

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

Sean, you never cease to amaze me!

I think I recall seeing publications using that font at the time. Good job.

Cheers,
Louis

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

.

Dick Estelle... that name sounds familiar... I was quite involved in the GEOS community back in the late 80s and early 90s. I wrote some games for GEOS that got published by LoadStar magazine, and I did some of my own for fun. There was a small, but active GEOS development community. I was a wannabe for a while, but I soon wrote some programs that got some respect.

In fact, when I went to search for my old programs for GEOS, I found most of them archived on the web, contacted the people listing them, and got copies. Even my "The Runner" comic book was archived on the web. I had to go to around three separate sources, but I finally got all 13 pages. One file was corrupt, but I found another version and fixed the corruption using my C64 emulator (VICE) so now the comic book is complete again.

If you look, you'll notice that while the subject material is not Doctor Who-like, his outfit had some Who influences.

The Runner

I used the same graphics program for that as I did to create the Who font originally, and I also drew a TARDIS and the Baker Who logo using the same program.

I'm surprised anyone actually used that font, but It's certainly not impossible. So, Louis, yes, it's possible you saw some publications done at the time using that font. I released it into the wild (via Quantumlink) so it probably got downloaded by various GEOS-running Who fans and used for their local newsletters.

As I said, it's amazing how something you do decades ago comes back to remind you of it.

Kind of fun, actually.

My GEOS page has some treats for those who liked the 64. I wrote a Choose-Your-Own-Path comic adventure program for GEOS called geoComix, and my page has the path there in HTML. You can actually play through it on my web page.

There's also links to VICE, the Commodore 64 emulator which is excellent! I got GEOS up and running (which by the way is now available for free download from the official GEOS site) on the emulator, and now I can run all my old games that I wrote, and plenty of others which are available to download here and there. All the programs I wrote are available to download in emulator disk files.

Oh. And of course the Who font is there too for download.

If I could get my old disk files from my mother's attic (where my C128 currently sits gathering dust and deteriorating) I could probably resurrect the Doctor Who newsletter I wrote, and even print it to a laser printer.

Sean.

For the Real Computer Geeks Among Us

. This is kind of like therapy.

The first program I every wrote on my Apple ][ was one to draw a tardis with a blinking light.

The geeky shame!

Tim

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