joeganci

Wow! I wrote this in 1984! Here we are, 33 years later and here we are! The Commodore VIC-20 had just 3,500 bytes of free memory but BASIC was built into the system. Screen memory was separate so I was able to take advantage of that to keep track of scoring, with spares and strikes and all other bowling rules taken into account. This is a video of someone playing the game. I wrote an article on how I programmed this game and sent both it and the source code to COMPUTE Magazine, popular at the time. They sent me $100, my first computer programming sale. However, after that, they repurposed the source code and rewrote the article for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Commodore 64, IBM PCjr, Apple IIe, and others, plus they then reprinted the code in book compilations. Each time, they sent me another check! In all, I earned almost $1,000 on that game, which at the time was enough to buy a house and a car (uhm...slight exaggeration!). Adam Wrote: The world of the Astrocade wasn't the only corner of the computer world that loved bowling. In about 1984, on my Commodore 64, I used to play a bowling game written in BASIC. It was given to me on a disk by a neighbor and, to me, was called "Bowling." I thought that I would try to find it today. To my surprise, I found it rather quickly. The game is actually called Bowling Champ by Joseph Ganci. It appeared in the December 1983 issue of Compute's Gazette. I had no idea that this was a type-in magazine listing! Bowling Champ looks very similar to the Astrocade game Bowl by Edge Software (the game we almost played this round). Here is a screenshot of the C64 game that I just made: Bowling Champ (C64).gif Compute! Publications had pretty high standards. I just found the issue that Bowling Champ first appeared in. Check out this cool artwork that accompanied the game when it was published: Bowling Champ (Compute_Gazette(Dec 1983).jpg There is nothing like this artwork in the Astrocade newsletters; that's too bad.