Category: BBSing
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Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 2: Larry Mears
This is the second part of a multi-part series. Larry Mears prided himself on living in “Rocket City” — Huntsville, Alabama, the home of the Marshall Space Flight Center — but lamented that his high-tech town had no Atari dealers. Mears was an Atarian from way back. Excited by the promise of home computers, he…
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Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 1: Introduction
This is the first part of a multi-part series. “My God, what a fantastic program you’ve written! It’s astounding! I’m very, VERY impressed! This will change BBSing in the Atari world forever.” These words, written in February 1990, kicked off a gushing fan letter — the kind of feedback every hobbyist software developer dreams of…
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The college basketball bracket … in ANSI
Eleven years ago, when I worked as a designer of news and sports pages at a daily newspaper, I created a system to automate the production of our college basketball brackets in print. One year prior, data journalist Aaron Bycoffe pointed out on Twitter that NCAA.com was using a nice, clean JSON feed to power…
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Revisiting my ANSI tile map
Nearly 10 years ago, my daughter Jadzia wanted me to make a game called “Jewel Mountain.” One of my early ANSI experiments for the game was to make an RPG-style tile map in ANSI. When I started it years ago, my initial idea was to adapt 16×16 pixel-art tiles to sprites made of ANSI text,…
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Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves’ Guild
Paul Witte and Herb Flower were friends who collaborated from 1988-93 to create the BBS door game Thieves’ Guild and its graphical front-end client for the Atari ST under the “Mythyn Software” banner. Flower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Witte and Flower teamed up again in 2001 as…
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I completed my 7-year quest to play Thieves’ Guild
The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn. You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: “Thou seest rippling waters…” Sea serpent? Giant squid? Something’s out there, and it’s…
