Hello, Thanks for being so complementary about my programming abilities. I think I must have been about 16 when I wrote Out of this World. I never knew it had its name changed and my name removed when it went to Hungary. I knew Tim sent his software off to Eastern Europe, because he got some software back in return. He could never get any money out, though. Does anyone know what happened to Tim?
I found this while Googling around and was surprised to see the Box-soft name. But, John, I can't quite remember you. Did we meet? I do remember going to one or 2 Enterprise meetings in London.
Sorry if the Insane game disappointed you. I was quite young and got bored writing a game quite quickly. I always wanted to write shoot-em-ups, and still do get hooked on R-type from time to time (currently on the Wii). But I could never quite write them right. Just couldn't get the right playability.
I helped Tim work on the Spectrum emulator for a while, but I don't know if it was released. It was a remarkably simple piece of hardware, with some software that would convert the colour (or "attribute") information from Spectrum format to Enterprise format. I think I re-wrote that code, but whether that's the version that is being talked about on some of these boards, I don't know. I then went on to use the Spectrum emulator to help write some Spectrum games for Codemasters (none of them any good, I'm afraid). My Enterprise eventually got totally destroyed with all the re-wiring and hacking that went on, so I have no hardware to show, I'm afraid.
I still have some Enterprise disks lying around that I keep meaning to copy over and upload somewhere on the net. I don't know which could be acceptably released and which might still be considered copyright. I run a software company now, so have to be careful about legal issues.
That Paint program was a challenge. Someone else wrote it and then I added to it. The source was too large to load into memory, so we used a version of WordStar running under CP/M to edit the source. Then there was a CP/M assembler to assemble the source code into the program. It took about 15-20 minutes each time to assemble that one source file.
And I still configure every editor I use to treat shift-left as beginning of line, shift-right to go to the end, shift-up to go up a page, and alt-up to go to the top of the file. I'm used to it and I'm not going to change now. Does anyone else here do this?
