Re: Please tell me about old audiogames!
My first talking computer was an Apple 2e with an echo hardware synthesizer
that I got in 1985.
Back then there was no copy protection as you had to copy the screen reader
program to the 5.25 floppy disk and run both.
There was no hard disks so everything had to be loaded from floppy disk.
BAUD MAGAZINE (Blind Apple Users Discussion- Joe Jovanelli) was on cassette
and he sold floppy disks of text games that the blind could play.
Everything on the disks was open source so you could look at the code and
change any game.
I played Kidnapped, StoneVille Manor, Monopoly, Oregon Trail, Eamon
adventures and colossal cave.
In 1988 I bought a GEM game machine which was a TRS 80 Radio Shack computer
with a built in voice synthesizer.
It was designed to play only games on cartridges.
The cartridges cost about $40 or $50 each.
I bought their bowling game that I eventually re-created in Windows DOS in 1995.
Th
e GEM machine made sounds of beeps and bops that came from a sound
generating chip.
In bowling it made a boop sound at each inch running from the left to the
right on the bowling alley.
If you didn't throw your ball it would do it again and again.
When it reached a pin, it made three higher beeps to represent the left
side, middle, and right side of the pin.
To bowl your ball you hit the enter key.
Of course if you already heard the pin sound, it was too late to bowl, so
you had to listen to the sounds and anticipate when the pin sound would be
made.
The only other cartridge game i remember was a downhill skiing game.
When the Macintosh was released in 1994, suddenly the blind couldn't use
apple computers anymore as there was no synthesizer or screen reader
designed for it. I had to get an IBM computer that had three DOS screen
readers, JAWS for DOS, VocalEyes and ASAP.
The fi
rst DOS game I bought was Harry Hollingsworth's World Series Baseball.
It was released in 1989 and I got it in 1994.
In 1989 it was written in GW Basic.
You had to load the GW Basic program then run the WSBB .bas file to run the game.
It was all text based which needed an external synthesizer.
I used the double talk one that had a robotic voice.
In 1994 Harry began compiling the game as Baseball.exe
so people could no longer look at the source code of the game.
Back in 1994 there were BBS, bulletin board systems around the country that you could call up using a dial up modem at speeds of 14.4 bps
They had countless text only basic games to download.
They were in source code .bas format so you could look at the code and change it or add new features before playing it.
In September 1995, Carl Mickla started Personal Computer Systems with
his game, Any Night Football.
It was a DOS only game that used your DOS scree
n reader to describe game play
and used the PC speaker to make referee whistle sounds.
In March 1996, I joined PCS to create
DOS games using real sounds recorded as wave files.
In March 1996, PCS released Monopoly, our first game using real sounds.
We tried making the sounds play from within our
games but found that there were so many different DOS sound cards that it was too difficult to do.
We knew that several sound drivers were already available for DOS and we contacted their
developers and got their approval to include them in our games.
In April 1996, PCS released Tenpin Bowling, our second sound game that played just like the GEM machine game.
In August of 1996 We found out about Audyssey,
the magazine discussing computer games accessible to the blind.
We submitted our first article to Michael Feir in Issue 2: September/October, 1996.
In April of 1997 we started working with Harry Hollingsworth in<
br />making a real sound version of his World Series Baseball game.
He was willing to send me his source code so I could add the sound effects .wav files.
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