The House Is A Rockin'

So I have found my first Jaguar project.  I am going to adapt the game Dragon’s Gold by D.C. Owen. 

It was originally written (so far as I can gell!) for the Timex Sinclar 1000/1500.

My father brought one of those home in about the mid ‘90s along with a book titled “51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500” by Tim Hartnell.

That computer was a lot of fun, but extremely annoyng as well.  Some of the games were a lot of fun (Frogger was impressive), but the trick was you had to write the games and compile them before you could play them.  Not the easiest thing in the world to do. The computer’s keyboard was not a keyboard as we know them today. On no, It was a flat panel, smooth plastic job.  And the keys stuck. Oh how they stuck. One day I spent somewhere between 2 and 4 hours writing out Frogger.  I was nearly ready to go when someone set a glass of water on the table and caused the whole thing to reset itself.  Fortunately I had saved my code onto a cassette about an hour before, so I didn’t lose too much data.

I got Dragon’s Gold to compile and run exactly once. Every other time I tried ended in a similar fashion to Frogger. Anything from a cat knocking a power cord out of the wall to an incredibly finniky tapedeck to the thing just randomly resetting itself.

In the early 2000’s I decided I would take a crack at adapting it for the MS-DOS world and rewrite it in QBasic.  Before I could get very far, however, I ended up joining the Army. After getting injured and waiting to be transitioned back out I pulled out a notebook and started writing it out from memory.

By hand.

Because I’m crazy.

Somewhere along the line (probably when my apartment melted!) I lost said notebook.  Probably not a bad thing…My simple text based adventure game was suffering from “Feature Creep” wherein I was attempting to add too much to it.

So here I am. About to restart this from scratch for an actual video game console. Here is hoping I get somewhere with it!