Re: Jim Kitchen passed away
From Jim Kitchen
May22 , 2015
I started teaching myself the Basic programming language in 1980 on a Texas Instruments 99 4A- home computer. Next on an Atari 800 XL home computer, then an IBM PC Junior. I mostly wrote games with some simple graphics. By December of 1989 I no longer had any sight. I bought an N E C 286 running Jaws for dos version 1 with an Accent SA synthesizer. In January 1990 I was at the Cleveland Sight Center learning braille etc. So I wrote my braille reference guide program at that time. I was now programming in Quick Basic 4.5 which wrote directly to the screen, so the games were only accessible via Jaws for dos script files. Those games were on the Henter Joyce BBS in like 1991. Then I was told how to make Quick Basic 4.5 write to the bios and that made the games accessible for all dos screen readers, so I up loaded the games to the BBS PC Ohio, which was part of the planet connect system.&nbs
p; So the games got distributed to BBSs all over the world. That was probably in 1992 or 3. Then Phil Vlasak showed me how to shell out and use an external program to play sound files. So now we added sounds to the dos games. Well they had the little beeps etc from the little PC speaker before that, but now we were playing actual sound files in the games. In 2000 David Greenwood got me started with Visual Basic. Trucker was the first game that I converted from dos to Windows. It put temporarily highlighted text on the screen. Really only worked with Jaws. Also used something simple to play a sound file. I next wrote games such as Mach 1, golf and casino using recorded synthesized speech and TegoSoft to play the sound files. In 2003 I started the winkit.zip thing with the game menu system using the sapi5 text to speech engine instead of recorded speech. About that time Allen Maynard shared some DirectX code with
me which gave me even more features when playing sound files. Dan Zingaro shared code with me that told where at in the sound file you pressed a key. That was for the golf and baseball games. When the BBSs were replaced by the Internet David Poehlman put my games on his web site. Later I learned how to write my own web site from OSCAR SOSA's home page program. And of course Joshua Griffith has helped with VB6 code and maintaining my web site. Sorry if I forgot to mention others that have helped. I know that there were. There used to be a blind programmers list with lots of people who programmed in Visual Basic 6. And thinking back, can't forget Willie Wilson and his Blink Link BBS. That was the place to go for accessible games and other programs. There was also all of the FidoNet echoes for Email such as Blink Talk, Blind Talk and NFB Talk. Then the Blind X mailing list. They were general chat ec
hoes, but accessible games were discussed allot on them.
As far as I know, people are playing my games on M E, XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1. You know as long as you install the Visual Basic 6 run time libraries.
BFN
Jim
Check my web site for my 36 free games.
j...@kitchensinc.net
http://www.kitchensinc.net
(440) 286-6920
Chardon Ohio USA
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