The media hype about the upcoming Tron movie brings back memories of those days. I was using a Tandy Model 100 as my writing machine at that time. It had 32K of memory which could be used to store text or programs. I could get a short story or parts of a larger work in there. I remember taking the Model 100 under my arm and writing under a tree in the park.
Of course, it also had BASIC and I wrote programs as well. With the ability to set and test pixels on the little screen, I wrote a Tron Lightcycle program. It was single or dual player, using the arrow keys for one player and the F1-F4 buttons for the other. The single player played against the machine.
I posted it somewhere online and got some nice comments on its playability, but I’ve long since lost track of it. Even Google can’t find it. It might have been on a BBS, rather than a web site, and many of those never made the transition to the web. I don’t even know if I have a local copy. So much of my early work, especially software, was stored off on cassette or floppy and I no longer have the ability to read what media I have left. Old story scraps are in a little better shape since I can still read the scribbles on rumpled paper.
It’s a shame. I’d like to fire up the program an dodge around the screen again, just for old times sake, but I’ll never find it again.
Try checking out Club100.org….they've got a pretty large repository of software for the Model 100. There's an active community of Model 100,102 and 200 users out there…Interestingly, new peripherials have been developed for the Model 100, like a NADS box…(New Age Digital Storage) which lets the Model 100 write and read SD media cards…Several individuals in the online Model 100 User group are set up to copy old casette and floppy media onto SD memory cards. A visit to the site would point you in the right direction
Thanks for the pointer Anon, I was able to find my game in just a couple of minutes. It's named GRID, because I called it "Gridbug" when I wrote it. Looks like someone even improved it for the 200.
It's amazing how things survive out on the internet.