ADAM Computer Game of the Week #08

[NIAD]

Electronic Game Pack II

 

by Ape Software

 

No Extra Hardware Requirements

 

This week I am going really old-school with one of the earlier entertainment packages developed for the ADAM, Electronic Game Pack II by Ape Software. This game pack contains four games: Crater Tag, Snake Weeds, Sky King and Car Wars. While all the games are fun to play, Car Wars should garner the most interest as it is a very good rendition of Dodge 'Em... one of my personal favorites on the Atari 2600.

 

EGP II also contains built-in instructions that will automatically print to the ADAM Printer, but can't be viewed on-screen so I included the converted text files to simplify matters. Also, this is a Digital Data Pack image as I lost track of my disk image over the years and it can't be easily converted to run from a disk. If anyone needs help with converting this data pack image back to an actual Data Pack to be used on an ADAM Computer feel free to contact me.

 

EGP II can only be played on ADAMem/Virtual ADAM, it CAN NOT be played thru M.E.S.S. as there is no Digital Data Drive emulation.

Electronic Game Pack II (1986) (Ape Software).zip

[newcoleco]

First of all, I was not aware of this ADAM game pack before, so thanks for making me discovering this.

 

Second, I take this opportunity to mention something I think is funny.

 

This ADAM games compilation is called "Electronic Game Pack II"... I did two similar projects for the ColecoVision called GamePack#1 and GamePack#2.

 

Back story : To develop even more my Coleco devkit based on Marcel deKogel works and my own CV projects made so far, I did a bunch of small games adapted from a book of games written in BASIC for the Oric computer ( no sprite, just characters, not even 8x8 pixels per character ). Anyway, I've released years ago a cartridge titled "GamePack #1" for the ColecoVision with most of these tiny games that helped me a lot to optimize and improve my own toolkit library called "getput" included in the CV devkit. One tiny game in particular titled "CIRCUIT 24" in the "GamePack #1" CV cartridge is based on the same arcade game as "CAR WARS" shown here in the ADAM games compilation. The only exception between these two versions is that "CIRCUIT 24" is not smooth (remember, no sprite) and can be incredibly difficult to play (later levels are played at an incredible speed) unless you learn the right pattern in order to win every single time. It was quite a challenge to pack more than 10 games in a 32K cartridge (that means about 3K per game if we ignore the music and bitmap title screen that also need memory space). Unfortunately, "GamePack#1" and "GamePack#2" were not as well received as my other ColecoVision projects. But I'm proud anyway to have made them; the first one for size improvement (reduce size of existing routines and adding new ones shared by many games), the other for speed improvement (giving more CPU time to make AI think fast).