Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Assuming you can see video embeds, above is the trailer for Play Misty for Me, a 1971 movie with Clint Eastwood that seems to be the rough predecessor of KAXL.)

In my last post Rob sleuthed out another piece of information on The Case at KAXL that seems worth mentioning. This will be a short post but maybe it will help the actual Doug Rogers (out of the 20 or so I have looked at) find this page via a Google search one day.

First, the game states it is Copyright 1982 by Doug Rogers on the title screen of the GW-BASIC version. Since GW-BASIC wasn’t invented yet, we know it has to be a port; the file itself has a preserved timestamp of 1986-04-18, so it was made (or at least the last version was saved) in April of 1986.

I strongly suspected the original source was TRS-80 because of the odd case glitches. Look at this screen:

Notice how “sign” and “keys” are in lower case but the other objects start with an upper case letter. This suggests this was written on a computer which didn’t account for case. With TRS-80 in particular we’ve seen glitches where someone developed on a TRS-80 without case but then an oddity occurs when the same game gets moved to a later model that does have case. (That is, even when the display isn’t showing case, that still gets stored as data.)

The display is also wide, suggesting more than 40 columns, that is, not an Apple II (you could turn the classic Apple II into 80 column mode but the card that enabled that also put in lower-case mode letters).

However, this is still hand-wavy explanation, and the real evidence came from the fact it was later published for TRS-80, Model 4. All the way out in 1993 (!) but still:

TRSTimes was launched in 1986 when Lance Wolstrup had found out that 80 Micro no longer was going to cover the TRS-80, and lasted all the way to 1995.

Therefore, it is with some sadness that I declare this to be the very last issue of TRSTimes. I hope that our readers have benefitted from reading our publication. My appreciation goes out to all the many people who, over the years, shared their knowledge with us, especially my good friend, Roy Beck, without those articles TRSTimes would not have lasted past the first year.

Goodbye … and thanks.

The printing of KAXL ripped out the copyright date, no doubt it seeming awkward to publish a game 11 years after it was written. The presence of the new piece of information led me down the road of more Doug Rogers but unfortunately nothing has panned out.

This long lag time isn’t that odd for the TRS-80 community. Moreso than, say, the Apple II, they had a tradition of amateurism and retaining source code, and even now the major archive maintains a heavy amount of personal source code, and the proprietor (Ira Goldklang) will even rip your old disks and keep them private just for preservation purposes.

In order to keep a TRS-80 publication going all the way to 1995 a little amount of pulling out of the archives seems to be necessary.

Anyway, to compensate for such a short post, let me mention what’s coming ahead: two “short” games, followed by an Apple II game which I consider one of the most important for 1982 and I have been looking forward to reaching for a long time.