When I posted in my last entry that I had been waiting thirty years for the opportunity to create a game, I realized two things:

1. Damn, I'm old.

2. It isn't like I never did any game programming for thirty years.

Thirty years ago, in 1979, was when I got my first computer, a Heathkit H-89. I was seven years old at the time. My uncle Alan had an identical machine that he let me use when I visited him, and one Christmas I was at his place and playing with the computer and I didn't want to leave. It was then that my parents giggled and told me that the computer I had been working on was actually MY computer. He had built a second one (these were sold in kit form) and my parents had bought it, as my surprise Christmas present.

I immediately started delving into programming in BASIC. MBASIC, to be exact, written by this tiny company called Micro-soft that nobody had ever heard of. I still have the original manuals!

Anyway, the H-89 broke down for the last time in 1986, and the Heathkit company went out of business. All my games were stored on old-school hard-sectored 5.25" floppy disks, and have long since demagnetized. So most of the games I wrote back then have been lost forever.

In a fit of nostalgia, I took a couple of days and wrote a program in C# using the XNA frameworks. The program works as a full-screen graphics editor, with all 30-odd graphics characters in regular and reverse video available. Over the next few days I'm going to try and recreate screenshots of some of my games from memory, and post them here.