Chris Crawford

I dug around and found a folder full of old Atari stuff. I was going to upload it but then I discovered that I have apparently already done so: Atari Stuff.zip

Who was that handsome young man?

Yes, that was it! The music was great--especially the segue from the normal background music to the "you lose" music.

By the way, I worked with Carol and, as the video says, she was definitely a code wizard, although Ed Logg was problem the ultimate in code wizardry. The video emphasizes that Carol was one of the first women in the business, but the funny thing is that nobody saw anything special or odd about women in the business. That group was a pure meritocracy; if you knew your stuff, you were respected, and Carol definitely knew her stuff. I never once saw anything like sexism or sexual harassment in the Engineering group at Atari. There may have been plenty of it in other departments, but I can't recall ever hearing or seeing anything worthy of mentioning in that regard. Carol mentions one anecdote involving Ray Kassar, but he was a bit of a jerk anyway. Perhaps she could provide us with an anecdote about sexism in Engineering, but I doubt that there was much. I certainly never heard anything like that in conversations.

Jack Palevich did a two-player game that was great fun. I also liked the Frogger clone because it had such great music. And of course M.U.L.E. was the greatest game of that era.

Yes, Balance of Power was my first Mac game. I programmed it in Pascal, the only language available on Mac other than 68000 assembly code.

I'm sure that the code is somewhere in my archives, but I haven't found it. My guess is that somebody will have to go through a lot of floppies to find it.

You know, I can't recall when I did this. It was right around the time of the collapse. I recall working on two projects during that time: Last of the Incas and a sequel to "Eastern Front (1941)" called "Western Front (1944)". I abandoned both when I decided to make the jump to Macintosh. There was a delay between being laid off (January 1984?) and beginning work on the Mac because I had to wait some time to get the Lisa development system that I needed to program for the Mac. Perhaps I worked on these projects during that interlude.

It has been 35 years since I wrote that code, so I can't recall many details. The basic idea was something called "Galilean relativity": the idea that what you know at one location depends upon slow-moving information. That was the key issue in the Spanish response to the various Inca revolts: on the mountain trails, news travelled at the speed of a runner. The little sparkly things that traverse the roads are meant to demonstrate that. By the way, I was rather proud of the algorithm used to control that animation. You're right that the combat algorithms were never completed. Such algorithms are pretty straightforward to build, so I put them off until the end, because they are easily adjusted to balance the game. Skimming through the code was fun; assembler code is so different. If somebody does plunge into this, I'll try to answer questions about it.

I just realized that it would be easier for all concerned if I just upload it here. So here it is. Chris Excalibur.zip

I have placed the source code for Excalibur on my website for free downloading. The zipped file contains all the source code, in both .TXT and .ATR form. You can find it here: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code.html Enjoy!

I never did anything for the 5200; I actually did a little work on "Western Front 1944" but never finished. The game could certainly be applied to different theaters. However, the AI would probably not work well in a broken front environment.

I'm pretty sure that it was not in the instructions to the game. I have the instructions that accompanied the cartridge version and it's definitely not in there. My guess is that you saw it in some press story.

I cannot recall; during playtesting, scores are all over the map as different elements of the game are brought into focus. I do recall that when I made the second (cartridge) edition, I set as a goal making the game harder to win, because the first edition was too easy to completely clobber.

I can't recall. It *was* a really great monitor -- very crisp image, fit perfectly on a short stand behind the Atari.

I'm not sure if any of you folks have seen this photo, but I ran across it in an archive just now and thought that perhaps you might get a laugh out of it. It's just a photo of me while I was working on Eastern Front (1941).

By the way, I might as well mention this here: do you fellows know about the "frozen floppy" trick for recovering old floppies? It's very difficult to do correctly, but it has worked for me.

Yes, it was indeed Curt Vendel. Still, let's let Bob take a stab at it.

No, I'm no longer in the Bay Area, but I could send them to you in batches. What address should I use? Chris

I have a lot of old Atari floppies. I sent them all off to a fellow at the Atari museum. He read what he could and sent them back, including a CD-ROM with all the files he could pull off them. As you can see, they were pretty badly corrupted.

I have cleaned up the documentation for the Eastern Front (1941) source code package. It was badly corrupted, and portions are simply gone. I did the best I could with a bad situation and managed to reconstitute some of the most important stuff. Unfortunately, I could not find the original package, and so none of the hand-drawn material is here; I have only the stuff that I could find on the diskettes. If anybody has the physical package and would be willing to scan all the hand-drawn material, that would help greatly. In any case, I attach the zipped package containing the source code and the explanatory essays. Have fun with it. I spent far too much time cleaning this thing up. I have other work to do! Eastern Front Source Code.zip

I realized that the simplest way to distribute this stuff is simply to ZIP it all up and post it here. This is a ton of stuff, much of it junk. Pick through and, if there's any text that you can recover, please post it here. Chris Atari Stuff.zip

Ah! Thanks! I went directly into the files and recovered a lot of the text, but as you say it was badly corrupted and I've been slogging through it correcting the errors as best I can. I'll post the final results when I'm finished.

Can anybody translate the essays to ASCII?

Eastern Front (1941) was built with the Atari Assembler-Editor Cartridge. Later on we moved to the Macro Assembler.