Orion Board Games 1 (instructions and software)

[bxdanny]

I found a set of instructions/documentation from Orion Software's "Board Games 1" tape in my drawer of old OSI stuff, and decided to scan it and share it.

Originally, I was just going to upload the scanned PDF file and be done with it, but I started typing in the program listing for the Cubic game, a little at a time, and surprised myself by getting it finished a lot sooner than I expected to, so I have included that as well. The second game on the tape, the one I was responsible for (Mini-Gomoku), I have already made available as Program 4 on my "Enhanced Pico-Dos" disks, but I am including that here too, including as a stand-alone file meant to be loaded from tape.

Yes, pages 2 and 4 are the same (except for page 2 being offset too far to the left on the page). They were the reverse sides of pages 1 and 3, so I scanned both.

A few observations about this:
-The author of the Cubic game (who, according to their catalog, was Terry Terrance, the company's president) seems not to have understood how the RND function really worked. Any positive argument to RND acts identically to any other, so asking the user for a number between 0 and 1 is utterly pointless. However, negative numbers (and 0) do all act differently, and the program doesn't actually reject those.
-Terry also seems to have been confused about what the BASIC Terminal Width parameter did and didn't do. Making the Terminal Width larger will not increase the size of BASIC's input buffer, so it won't permit overlength lines to be input from tape.
-Finally, Terry seems to have been confused about the difference between Go and Gomoku. I doubt that "volumes and volumes have been written on Gomoku strategy", but they certainly have been on Go strategy. Very roughly speaking, Gomoku is to Go as checkers is to chess.

Two copies of the Cubic listing are included in the attached ZIP file. The .txt version is suitable for viewing or editing with a text editor like Notepad, while the .bas version includes the 10 nulls that OSI's SAVE routine inserts between the carriage return and line feed characters of each CRLF pair, and is intended for conversion to an audio cassette file.

I have added lines 20 and 175 so that the program can run properly with CEGMON systems, and also added line 1108, and modified lines 8000, 8002, and 8003, so that the spacing changes discussed on the Errata sheet can be implemented in a way that keeps the program compatible with both C1P/Superboard and C2/4/8 systems, with no lines exceeding the length of the input buffer. All other lines should be identical to the scanned listing. (Any places where they aren't, if such exist, are typos, and I'd appreciate having them pointed out.)

The Gomoku game, as I pointed out, is available on my Enhanced Pico-Dos disks as Program 4. A copy of that, with Cubic replacing the previous Program 7, is also included here, as is a cassette version of the game, in a format very much like the one originally sold. And I AM now releasing the software used to generate the tape. Program 4 on the disk image included here has the tape-generating software included. LOAD 4 and then RUN 10 to generate a tape, or just RUN to play the game. (My article in Compute II that Terry mentions only discussed making standard Monitor-load tapes, so really isn't of very much interest, and seems to be absent from online copies of that magazine anyway.) And since I at one point ported the game to the Commodore 64, I'm including a copy of that (.P64 file, suitable for use with the VICE emulator) too. I hope that's not considered too inappropriate for this forum.

[bxdanny]

Happy New Year to everyone. May it be safe, happy, and healthy for all.

Anyway, I have realized that, if the Gomoku game is loaded from a real audio cassette prepared from the file linked above, one or more characters of the final IF statement may be dropped due to the time it takes the screen to scroll, resulting in a false LOAD ERROR message. I have corrected that, and also took the opportunity to make a few other minor tweaks to it:

- Added two more line feeds just before the board is drawn, so that the first two lines of video memory on the 540 board will be fully cleared.
- Made the code again fit in its original footprint of 2276 to 3747 (decimal).
- Rearranged drawing of the board slightly so that, if it is interrupted and then restarted, the rows will still be labeled correctly starting with "A".
- If the tape version is loaded on a 600D with the Video Swap program loaded, the board will be switched to 24 x 24 mode before the game starts.

As before, the version on the disk (Program 4) can be used to generate a copy of the cassette version (on a system with both disk and cassette). There are also small changes to Program 1 (line 306) and Program 3 (line 45).