Unfinished Business

by David Wyn Davies

There is nothing more annoying and self-defeating than having numerous plans and not pursuing them to completion. Such was the case when, in 1993, I launched a new Atari user group aimed at promoting new software development for the Atari 8-bit.

The Atari Classic Programmer's Club (ACPC) was a club through which membership could gain you access to a programming help-line, a bi-monthly newsletter and the opportunity to get involved in commercial-quality programming projects for the Atari 8-bit systems. I sent a copy of the first draft issue to one of my contacts.

I was surprised to receive a letter some days afterwards from the late Dave Ewens of the Tyne and Wear Atari User Group (TWAUG). TWAUG was a long-standing user group based in the North-East of England and it already had an established newsletter. Dave suggested I contact him with a view to advertising the club in TWAUG free of charge. Since producing a prominent advert in Page 6's New Atari User magazine (a name I never liked) was expensive, I jumped at the chance.

Lifetime membership was only £12. This proved to be a mistake since within 18 months I had to revert to making it £12 for 12 months. Membership grew slowly because the club was intended to attract a niche market.

Before long I was filled with enthusiasm for bringing new software to the Atari. I was also interested in re-releasing older software so began writing to developers and publishers of this "extinct" software. Most of the replies were somewhat discouraging. Electronic Arts wanted its lawyers to write a copyright transfer agreement, which would have cost a fortune. CSS was a little more forthcoming with regards to its excellent Colossus Chess program and other lesser-known titles but wanted £100 for them. While this was on the face of it quite reasonable, I didn't have the money at the time. One company which was very helpful was Audiogenic and in particular its Managing Director, Peter Calver.

An agreement was reached quickly with regards to what I believe was its one and only Atari 8-bit title, Swift Spreadsheet. I was supplied with several copies of the original Atari disks still lying around, plus some manuals and box overlays. There weren't enough manuals to go around so I set about designing an A4 comb-bound manual. A little extra work needed to be done because the only manual supplied was for the Commodore 64, with the extra addition of an Atari keyboard reference card.

One of the club's original members, Ken Hill, felt that he would be able to create a cassette version but, despite work being started, nothing came of it.

Swift Spreadsheet was one of the more powerful spreadsheet programs to be released for the Atari and had a range of maths and cell manipulation functions only found in some rather more expensive programs. It certainly wiped the floor with the spreadsheet in Mini Office II, which most Atari users were using at the time.

Review copies were sent to New Atari User, and Current Notes in the USA. Both reviews were favourable but I got the impression the reviewers were having difficulties getting to grips with the range of features on offer.

As well as the permission for Swift Spreadsheet, I was also given permission to develop two games through the club. Both were games I had enjoyed immensely on the ST - Helter Skelter and Loopz.

Helter Skelter was put on hold until we'd sorted out the development for Loopz. It was a puzzle game. How hard could it be to convert? I handed the task of the conversion over to John Foskett, who had written several public domain adventure games in Turbo BASIC. He didn't have anything other than an 8-bit, so I had to describe the game to him, which was not an easy task.

As time went on, John busily worked on the game and kept me updated as to its progress. But after a few weeks things came to a grinding halt. John had been working on it in his favourite language, Turbo BASIC, but hadn't counted on one issue cropping up: lack of memory. It got to a point where the game couldn't be compiled because Turbo BASIC was taking up too much memory itself.

John gave up and gave me a copy of what he had done. He had done an excellent job on the game's mechanics, even more so when you consider he had never seen the original before, but I was disappointed with the game's graphics which looked, well, as if the game had been written in BASIC. At the time, I wanted to do the work myself but was already working on a major project of my own...

In 1993, during a discussion with Dave Ewens, he pointed out there was one program he wanted more than anything - a decent disk cataloguer. On the basis of our discussion, I decided to see what I could do. I investigated the popular Rob C. and Multiboot XL menu disks to see how the program entries were stored and quickly knocked up a program that would read these menus and print out their contents. This program was written in a week using my favourite programming language, the little-known PL65 compiler I bought via mail order in 1987. I sent a copy of what I had done to Dave, who urged me to continue with the project.

The design for Menu Print was ambitious. It should read all Atari DOS disks, Rob C. menus, Multiboot menus, Howfen menus and various other DOS systems. The really interesting part was that it should also have the ability to recognize boot disks, such as Alternate Reality.

It took two years to develop but was shelved after it was around 90% complete. There were several reasons for this. The first was that I simply ran out of memory. The project was too big for the equipment I had at the time, which only consisted of a single stock 800XL, a 1050 disk drive and 1029 printer. The second was that there was far too much disk swapping, as it was intended to run on a single drive. The third reason was that it required three rewrites. This was because of data corruption caused by a slipping drive belt. Micro Discount was by this time interested in publishing Menu Print for me and offered to repair the drive free of charge, which it did but also fitted a US Doubler for nothing as well since the proprietor, Derek Fern, wanted the program to be expanded further to read the various Warp Speed menus.

Then came the untimely and unexpected death of Dave Ewens, who had provided all the encouragement and helped push me into developing the Menu Print software. There was nobody as enthusiastic about the Atari 8-bit machines as Dave. With this also came the demise of my own enthusiasm. Not long afterwards, it was decided to scrap the club. The Atari Classic Programmer's Club never managed to fulfill its potential.

So what of the unfinished projects? In 1998 I briefly had a go at programming Loopz myself. This version was written using the PL65 compiler and I was amazed how quickly it came together. Within a week, I had an almost complete game! Also, I had taken the graphics from the ST and produced a game that looked virtually identical to the ST version, apart from the obvious lack of colours. The game used a modified display list to split the screen into mode 15 for the top half and mode 8 for the status and score display. When I ended the project, I had just one issue to deal with and it would have been complete apart from the high scores and sound.

As for Menu Print, I did toy with the idea of reworking it in assembly recently and also came up with an idea that would have drastically cut the amount of memory required. But I doubt there's a market for such a product now.

There is still a possibility that one of these projects could be resurrected, perhaps as a limited edition ROM cartridge for an on-line charity auction. But I'd like to know how many people might be interested in these or any other "official" limited edition game conversion projects for the Atari 8-bit.

So there you have it, a bit of little-known Atari 8-bit history.

MyAtari magazine - Feature #5, November 2002