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rodneylives

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So I've started going through all the issues from the beginning to compose a list of all the software that Loadstar published, and compile a list of highlights that might catch the eye of a current-day user.

A lot of Loadstar software is, unfortunately, not hugely useful today. Like the Steinman Spreadshet on issue 15 is a wonderful achievement on the system, but everyone has access to spreadsheets in their web browser now. There's an Area Code database on issue 22 that's was useful back then, but is now not only out of date but has been wholly superseded by Google.

What Loadstar programs are still useful, on their own terms, now in 2025, outside of a purely retro-computing context? The games leap to mind, the art and music still have intrinsic value. But what else? And what specific games, art, music, etc. have stuck with you?

For me, back on issue 39, the first issue I got as a kid, was Zorphon by Nick Peck, a pretty decent spaceship shooter that I think still holds up. Has anyone else tried it?
 
rodneylives said:
What Loadstar programs are still useful, on their own terms, now in 2025, outside of a purely retro-computing context? The games leap to mind, the art and music still have intrinsic value. But what else? And what specific games, art, music, etc. have stuck with you?
Click to expand...

One particular thing that has been circling in the mental list of 'someday ideas' is issue #181 that Robin Harbron used to build a JRPG-style menu system.

 
I think the Loadstar-supplied C64 libraries for menus, patterned backgrounds, fonts, text viewer, screen swapper, mouse driver, disk utility libraries and so on which they used and encouraged others to use for program development are excellent. The best part is that most are designed to work with BASIC by adding wedge commands or extended SYS commands (i.e. SYS with parameters). Almost all of the in-house developed games and "brainware" were written in BASIC using these libraries. They could be rapidly developed and run nearly as fast as ML.

Maurice Jones card game dev libraries are also rock solid. There are some text adventure development tools. On LS128, there's an entire RPG devkit for the VDC. I didn't even mention the mountain of GEOS stuff (mostly because I've never used it).
 
Well, here's a couple of games I appreciate: Zorphon on #39, and Paragon on #50 (I think). Both were written by Nick Peck, and show quite a high level of polish! I've found a Nick Peck online who may be the person who made them, but I am unsure.

Someone who I know is still around is Ron Coffen, creator of All Smiles from #25 I think, republished later on #39. He had a number of other programs and other items on early issues. I've been in contact with him over email, and it's definitely him!
 
rodneylives said:
Well, here's a couple of games I appreciate: Zorphon on #39, and Paragon on #50 (I think). Both were written by Nick Peck, and show quite a high level of polish! I've found a Nick Peck online who may be the person who made them, but I am unsure.

Someone who I know is still around is Ron Coffen, creator of All Smiles from #25 I think, republished later on #39. He had a number of other programs and other items on early issues. I've been in contact with him over email, and it's definitely him!
Click to expand...
All Smiles is a pretty good game. I think I got up to level 5.

There's a great Hungarian game called Overload on a much higher issue which I thoroughly enjoy. I'm wondering what its grid search algorithm is. It seems to just check each square from top-left and move right until it hits a bomb and then starts over. If I were to implement it, I would use breath-first search. I'm curious if the outcomes are different.

On a different note, there's a nearly pixel perfect copy of Microsoft Minesweeper on some issue which has a serious bug. On my second game of play, I found most bombs, but then there was a set of numbers that didn't make sense. I clicked where I determined was least likely to have been a bomb, of course, there it was. There were two bombs next to each other with adjacent squares indicating "1". I played on real hardware and took a photo of it with my phone shown below. I clicked on the cell with the X'd-out bomb.

IMG_4619[1].jpg
 
Now that we have a second (and better) example, notice two things:
  1. There are 11 bombs rather than the specified 10.
  2. In both cases, the numbers (clues) would be correct, if not for the X'd-out bomb.
It appears that the bomb is a phantom and might not actually be in the grid. It's probably a bug in the checking code. I'm just guessing here, I have no idea.

Unfortunately, the main program is entirely ML. The only BASIC code is to SYS into the program and then return to Loadstar upon returning from the SYS statement.
 
Well, this is embarrassing. So, I’ve been playing Star Sweeper a lot lately and realized that those aren’t bugs, but my own errors. There’s no instructions explaining the symbols. The X over the bomb when one blows up is the location of an errant flag. Once I understood this, played a couple hundred rounds of the game, got pretty good at it, I can say that the program is correct and very stable.

There is one small bug in it though for sure. The game will check for completion (all bombs flagged and remaining cells uncovered) upon placing a flag and clicking on the final cell. But doesn’t check if remaining cells are uncovered in a cascade of blanks. When this happens, the only thing one can do is right-click on a flagged cell to remove the flag and then add it back, this triggers the game ending (smiley face donning sunglasses).
 
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