Jeff Olson - Alphaman: Developing and releasing a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game in the DOS days
60A retrospective of the challenges and rewards of developing Alphaman, a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game for DOS back before Windows or widespread internet use. Jeff talks about the challenges of programming with Microsoft QuickBasic while gearing the code for computers with 8088 microprocessors, with the intent to distribute on 3 ½” disks. He describes some of his motivation for the admittedly quirky aspects of Alphaman, and talks about some of the content and humor that did and didn’t stand up to the test of time after nearly 30 years. He also includes a plug for the GitHub site where Jamie Bainbridge put the source code (he's Jeff's hero for managing to successfully recompile Alphaman after nearly 30 years!) This provides a peek into the source code of a project that grew much larger than originally expected, requiring expanding the original clumsy QuickBasic code with QuickC modules, which themselves included embedded machine language code at places where computation speed needed to be increased. Kids these days have it so easy!