[ScottAdams]

Really good question!

I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic.

I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them.

I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC.

I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired.

Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!

[pamoroso]

Very interesting, thanks. I wonder whether you distributed those early commercial games as BASIC source on tape.

[ScottAdams]

Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!

[mypalmike]

Pirate Adventure was the first game I had on my Atari 800. I really loved it. I still remember coming across the terms "pieces of eight" and "flotsam and jetsam" and having to ask my mom what they meant. I seem to recall it was my first encounter with the the word "flat" meaning apartment. My vocabulary was thus improved by your work. Thanks!

[ScottAdams]

Yes those were all terms I used in my game! I loved reading and had a good vocubulary that I liked to use when it seemed appropriate :)

I am happy you have such good memories of my classic games! Have you tried any of my new ones?

[mypalmike]

I have to admit I haven't, but since you're asking nicely, I will look into them. Cheers! :-)

[ScottAdams]

Please let me know what you think about them [e-mail]

[pamoroso]

Got it, thanks again.

[DonHopkins]

Oh yeah, the TRS-80 Level II was much fancier and more powerful than the Level I, by far! Level I BASIC was pretty cheesy. Good call. ;) I bet you even had an Expansion Interface, huh?

[chipotle_coyote]

This is giving me childhood flashbacks at this point. I did indeed have a Model I TRS-80 with an Expansion Interface, albeit LNW's third-party one. And I remember typing in the BASIC version of "Adventureland" from Captain 80's Book of Basic Adventures -- which was in the news again recently, crazily enough, due to former whiz kid TRS-80 programmer and later columnist/editor Harry McCracken finding and fixing a typo in the adventure he contributed to that.

And, yes, I wrote one or two text adventures which had the split screen interface -- current room, objects, and exits on the top, while commands and their responses scrolled on the bottom -- that I'm pretty sure Scott Adams pioneered. (Mine were very bad.)

[ScottAdams]

Yes the Bob Lidil book was very special. I also saw the conversation on Harry's old game. That was a fascinating story. Amazing after all these years.

[ScottAdams]

I did indeed. I had one of the earliest expansion interfaces and disk drive. It had severe noise on the bus cable which caused no end of problems! They finally came out with a field service repair for it.