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We had PET computers in my high school, 4032's IIRC, and a few classic games to go with them - the excellent Space Invaders port, Star Trek of course, and a few others. These all used PETASCII for graphics, if any.

In my last year there I found someone had brought in a bunch of new games, and one in particular still strikes me as odd to this day. It was a shoot-up-from-the-bottom game like Space Invaders, but had several submodes, in the fashion of Gorf or Astro Blaster. I seem to recall that the player's ship was two triangles and perhaps fired two shots at the same time?

All of these sub-games featured graphics that were far in advance of what I had seen before. One in particular consisted of a small number of alien ships (two?) mid-screen shooting lighting bolts down the screen. These were not typical graphics, they appeared semi-transparent and seemed to be vectors. Beyond that, everything was fast.

Can anyone hazard a guess what this game may have been?

Maury Markowitz
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    There's an optional high resolution graphics board for the Pet that supports 512x512 graphics. The game you're thinking of was probably designed to use it. – snips-n-snails Sep 26 '17 at 20:12
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    The final PETs also use a 6845. So no doubt you could set character height to a single row, rupture every line, and hopefully find a sufficiently useful bunch of first lines amongst the character set to get close to real pixel output. But you wouldn't be compatible with most PETs. – Tommy Sep 26 '17 at 20:22
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    Sorry I should have mentioned that this was on the 4032's, IIRC. They were in use since around 1982. I have updated the question to note this. We definitely did not have graphics cards. – Maury Markowitz Sep 26 '17 at 20:30
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    My quick research suggests the 6845 CRTC made it into all PETs with issue 3 and issue 4 boards, which either includes "Fat-40" 4032s or all 4xxxs, sources disagree. Not sure that I'm actually being helpful here though, this is probably a digression. – Tommy Sep 26 '17 at 20:54
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    @tommy Here's a (modern) demo apparently using the technique you describe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktUguF1TnJk – tofro Sep 26 '17 at 22:28
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    It's possible that the game was changing the character being displayed very rapidly – potentially even from scan-line to scan-line so a "cell" showed parts of more than one character at the same time (I believe I remember hearing this was done on some machines of the era; don't know if it was possible on the PET). This would naturally give rise to a "semi-transparent" effect (the degree of which would depend partly on how well synchronised the changes were with the video). – TripeHound Sep 27 '17 at 10:44
  • Someone suggested Star Spores, but I can only find a CoCo video. Anyone have a pointer to info on this? – Maury Markowitz Sep 28 '17 at 17:38
  • @tofro, that video is marked private and not viewable - unless i am doing something bone-headed, which is a shame as I was curious to check it out... – Geo... Jan 28 '23 at 15:40

2 Answers2

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And it's definitely Star Spores. I found an interview with the author, who it turns out lives fairly close to me, and he mentioned the line-drawing routine which I'm sure is referring to the lightning bolt effect.

It seems this game has been lost to history. The interviewer mentions trying to find a copy to upload, but look as I might I cannot see it anywhere. Interestingly, the game was originally distributed on BBSs, so it might still be out there on someone's archived file library.

UPDATE: As it was a BBS upload, it's not clear how widely it would have spread. It's possible this was not well known outside the Ontario area. For those of you who have not seen this game, if we do track it down, you need to check it out. It was far in advance of anything else I saw on the PET.

Maury Markowitz
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    The author mentions that he has a copy on cassette but hasn't made an effort to determine how to convert it; if he could be persuaded to upload an audio grab of that then it could be recovered. I'd definitely be willing to have a crack, being au fait with the Commodore encoding. If ever anybody should happen to speak with Jim Summers, it would be worth an ask. – Tommy Sep 28 '17 at 22:04
  • Very long shot: This thread on a site about a handheld computer (Pyra) mentions a PET emulator that included Star Spores... the link to the PC version seems dead, but (a) it suggests a copy exists (or did), and (b) there may be a way of getting in touch with person who wrote the emulator. – TripeHound Sep 29 '17 at 07:19
  • @Tommy (and Maury) [This thread] on the Vintage Computer Federation site claims to have a copy... – TripeHound Sep 29 '17 at 07:29
  • @TripeHound - the link didn't work, can you post it as plain text? – Maury Markowitz Sep 29 '17 at 13:47
  • Curious... www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?40942-Commodore-Pet-Disk-Images – TripeHound Sep 29 '17 at 13:48
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20120126012509/http://www.scale18.com/nacl/pet.html is the most recent Wayback Machine archive of the site which originally hosted the emulator. The Wayback Machine doesn't preserve binaries, alas. There's some chance you could find petwiz.gpe by searching FTP high and low, but good luck with pet.zip. – Tommy Sep 29 '17 at 15:19
  • This thread also claims to have a copy to download, but like the vcfed.org page also requires registration: https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/51690-passend-zum-asteroiden-astro-rescue-slime-und-star-spores-f%C3%BCr-pet-cbm/ You can see a screenshot of the game on that apge at least. –  Sep 29 '17 at 15:26
  • I also found an active hosting by Kevin Pickell of the Chrome NaCL version: http://www.scale18.com/nc/game/game.html — that might work and reveal a game image somewhere if you have a sufficiently old copy of Chrome. – Tommy Sep 29 '17 at 15:32
  • Possibly resolved: following @RossRidge's forum 64 link via a German blog page, it is alleged to be included in http://blog.c128.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/prg_jim_summers_games.zip per http://blog.c128.net/archives/910 . I am at work, so will not immediately be verifying — practising my German while waiting on a build is one thing, downloading software is another... – Tommy Sep 29 '17 at 15:45
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    @Tommy for comparison, here is the file extracted from the NaCL version: http://cleverdomain.org/starspores.bin (I think it's the raw binary rather than a disk image, but I don't know my PET all that well). – hobbs Sep 29 '17 at 20:19
  • @hobbs will inspect; it could also be a PRG image, which is something Commodore folk use. It's a raw binary dump of a file that was once on disk or tape, prefixed by a two-byte loading address. Commodore DOS used to denote them as PRGs but that wasn't really part of the file name so they don't always carry the extension. The LSB for is almost invariably 01 so that would be a clue; the MSB depends on memory model (and possibly system, I'm not confident off the top of my head, though 08 is definitely C64, 64kb, and 04, 10 and 12 are 8kb, 5kb and 32kb respectively as on the Vic-20) – Tommy Sep 29 '17 at 21:12
  • @Tommy it does appear to be a PRG. VICE loads it as such (and it works). Magic is 01 04. – hobbs Sep 29 '17 at 21:56
  • @hobbs how did you load this file? I installed VICE and thought it would be the "snapshot", but it doesn't like the .bin in that item or as a disk or tape. It might just not like the extension, but I'm not sure. – Maury Markowitz Sep 30 '17 at 12:25
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    @MauryMarkowitz Snapshots are entire emulator save states, you create one while using the emulator and then later use it to restore the emulated computer back into the exact state it was in. To get it working I renamed it to all caps STARSPORES, started xpet with it in the current directory and changed the following settings: Drive Settings -> True drive emulation -> Off, Virtual device traps -> On, Pet model settings -> PET model -> 4032. Type LOAD "STARSPORES",8 and RUN. Don't hold shift to type any of this, use the 2 key above W for ", and use the 8 on the keypad. –  Sep 30 '17 at 17:16
  • @MauryMarkowitz I used "Smart Attach Disk/Tape", and it recognized it and loaded it for me. Then just RUN. – hobbs Sep 30 '17 at 19:56
  • unfortunately, all the mac versions of VICE appear to not work. the SDL version quits on startup, while the cocoa version does not recognize keyboard – Maury Markowitz Sep 30 '17 at 20:05
  • @MauryMarkowitz I had a similar problem with the Linux version not recognizing keyboard input, but I copy/pasted RUN into the window and the game did start up and proclaim itself to be Star Spores by Jim Summers. I can't do much about emulators that don't want to work properly :) – hobbs Oct 01 '17 at 01:54
  • I can't follow from the many comments whether or not you have found a working game. In any event, I found a page on Zimmers.net which lists Jim_Summers_Games.d64.gz as Astro-Rescue, Slime, Star Spores -- maybe worth a look? – KlaymenDK Jun 29 '18 at 09:26
  • Loading it is even simpler: xpet -model 4032 starspores.bin – Rhialto supports Monica Nov 30 '19 at 21:51
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This was indeed Jim Summers who wrote Star Spores. He also wrote Slime and Astro-Rescue.

You can find them on my site, with his permission.

Star Spores

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
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Marcel
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    Please provide a direct link to Star Spores; otherwise this is basically an advert for your site. I can't find the game anywhere! – wizzwizz4 Feb 04 '19 at 21:38
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    The original link worked ok for me. Great site BTW. – Maury Markowitz Feb 05 '19 at 21:29
  • Everything but the main page appears to be broken now, Errors are: Protocol error for HTTPS (i.e. the SSL/TLS handler on the server needs to be upgraded) and 404 not found (for /details.asp); also, search isn't working ("Please enter something to search for." on submit). – Alex Hajnal Aug 08 '21 at 17:12
  • This link seems to work: https://www.commodoregames.net/commodore_pet_game_655.html#gsc.tab=0 – RedFilter Feb 21 '23 at 05:41
  • Here's another potential link for Star Spores: https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/pet/games/english/index.html – Adam Lawrence Jan 16 '24 at 17:31