© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering My brother Dan and I have been making computer games since the Atari 2600. Dan did have a bit of a gaming pedigree even before that. He was president of Phoenix games, the publisher of the award winning game Streets of Stalingrad. He also had the distinction of publishing one of the first add-ons for Dungeons & Dragons, inciting Gary Gygax to declare him to be a “slimeworm on the industry.” We liked Dave Arneson best anyway. After the implosion of the Atari 2600 market, thank you ET, we moved on and started writing games for the Commodore 64. That was an interesting machine to work on. It was so much simpler to program than the Atari 2600, I mean, you didn’t even have to code in your own sync pulses!  (Sorry for the techie moment.) Anyway, we took a couple of the games up to see the Commodore people. Our games were unique at the time, in that they used a pair of joysticks for cooperative play. That completely flaked out the commodore staff. It was inconceivable to them that people would want to play together without beating on each other. While looking into other marketing options, like Avalon Hill who lost their nerve in the Atari 2600 collapse, thanks again, ET, I got bored and made a couple of phone calls. Those calls resulted in a contract to write a book on Arcade Game Programming for the Commodore 64, which had the catchy title Commodore 64 Arcade Game Assembly Language Programming, AKA Tab Books #1919. What was unique with the book, other than teaching arcade game programming techniques in assembly, was that I convinced TAB Books that including a floppy with all of the code samples from the book was an incredibly good idea, which made it one of the first books to carry the code in a useful format. TAB blinked before the book got published and decided that it would be an even better book with a couple of hundred pages of assembly. That does make for a light read. Of course, when Google infringes the copyright by scanning it, they’ll be breaking a second copyright by having the assembly code in a computer readable format. Funny thing about embedded copyrights. Go Google! The book opened some interesting doors in the gaming industry. We were asked to do proof of concept demos for some rather high profile games. Especially when the PC came out with its weird EGA display, not too many people knew what to do with the things. We ended up creating demos of a little game called Star Trek, and later on another title called Sonic the Hedgehog. While Sonic was doable at the time, Sega was a little concerned about requiring graphics cards with 256K, yes K young-uns. We also programmed up a kids game called My Town that was created by that Tom guy who would later be broke and design Video Titler. My town was a cooperative game in which kids could bulldoze roads and grow towns. It even had a 22 train rolling through. Video Titler™ sent us down a path that was a little separate from games for a while. Now it was programmed in assembly just like any other good game, but I never found a good way to keep score. As Video Titler™ brought us to Hollywood, it also showed that there was value in some of the new graphics cards that could actually display more than 256 colors. We created a program that we called Video Show Assistant that was renamed to QuickShow when HSC published it. This program was quite unique in that not only did it support all three graphics chips that could run in these 16 bit color modes, but it also gave the user a choice of doing it from either DOS or Windows. Boy did I learn a lot about Windows guts in that project. It’s OK, the nightmares ended years ago.