1981 BASIC adventure game comes to a new platform, the TRS-80 MC-10 | Hacker News Reader

1981 BASIC adventure game comes to a new platform, the TRS-80 MC-10

arctic81.com

24 pointsvontzy6 comments

As the article alludes, the MC-10 was intended to fight super-cheap computers that many thought the industry was moving to, specifically the ZX81 AKA Timex-Sinclair 1000.

Two things happened:

* Americans had more money to spend than Britons, and weren't interested in TS1000 even with 2K of RAM compared to ZX81's 1K.

* Commodore. Specifically, Jack Tramiel so aggressively lowered VIC-20's price—forcing others to follow—that by the time MC-10 hit the market, VIC-20 was already at $99. So was TI 99/4A, preempting TI's own 99/2 import fighter.

Commodore even ended up preempting itself, with (after Tramiel's departure) Commodore 16 ending up selling for more than VIC-20 with zero software.

Jack intended the Commodore 16 to sell for $49 and the Plus/4 for $79.

He wanted the Commodore 16 to replace the VIC-20 (both with graphics and sound in one chip to reduce costs) with a faster CPU, higher resolution graphics (could run PET/C64 40x25 educational apps), more color, and a better BASIC. He wanted the Plus/4 for small business owners who couldn't afford an IBM PC.

He left before the computers were completed and Commodore Marketing decided to position the Plus/4 as an upgrade from the Commodore 64 for $299. Due to being worse than the Commodore 64 and more expensive, it flopped in the market.

The Commodore 16 was $99 but the Commodore 64 was almost as inexpensive by then and had 64K of RAM, sprites, and lots of games. The VIC-20 would have been cancelled instead of letting it compete with the Commodore 16 until January 1985.

If the computers had been priced as Jack intended, they would have been more successful and the Commodore 16 might have even outsold the VIC-20.

Also, the Plus/4 ROM apps were terrible because someone decided to cut the ROM size, forcing the apps to but trimmed down and making them next to useless. If that hadn't happened, they would have been of more use to small businesses.

Very cool! I had an MC-10 when I was a little kid. It was my first computer, and I didn't know anyone else who had one. I didn't have the book with this Arctic Adventure program, but I had another book with an adventure game you could type in. [1] I stayed up past my bedtime and spent significant time typing it in. However, after typing in much of the program, I encountered my very first "out of memory" error. I was astonished that 4KB of RAM wouldn't be enough, and that I was going to need a better computer!

I clearly had the wrong book for that computer. ;)

[1] https://www.retroprogrammez.fr/listings/aventure/cia/

Adapt it to Inform6/ZMachine.

It's worth noting that you can target the Z-Machine (which gets you nice web platforms like Parchment) without using Inform as your source language. I informally maintain (I did not originally write) a C compiler for the Z-Machine, which I have used to port several games of a similar vintage: https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent

It occurs to me that it would be nifty to make a BASIC compiler for the Z-Machine.

There was another one called Dialog too.

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