Original Source of TI protos

[Toucan]

I was talking to @Ksarul about this today and figured I would post this as it's not well known and maybe could lead to some interesting discussion. Probably about 20 years ago now, I received a bunch of disks containing released and unreleased cartridge dumps from a woman in Canada named Lucie Dorais (sp?). These disks contained games like Lasso, Wing War, Angler Dangler, etc. What was intriguing to me was that these disks were marked 1985, on a printout of the contents taped onto the disk sleeve. That was intriguing to me since 1985 was only 2 years after TI pulled the plug on the home computer, so these titles were discovered close to the time the TI-99 was still in production. Anyway, I decided to see if I could track down the source of these games, and who actually found them. As they seem to be the source for many of the unreleased dumps we have today (the disks auto load in XB with a nice menu BTW). So I talked with Lucie and she said she thought they were from the Chicago UG, which in turn I eventually tracked them down to the Atlanta UG somehow (forget how). Anyway, I came across someone who was a teenager while with the Atlanta UG named @dphirschler. He knew about these games (as I thought he would, as he was a teenager back then) and said his father had a friend by the name of Hal Kam (a member of the UG) who in turn had a contact at TI and was the source for many of the unreleased games that circulated in the UG back in the day (like the early versions of Wing War, Lasso, Fantasy, etc.). Apparently Hal Kam got these from his TI contact in 1983 while they were still in development and they eventually made their way around to the other UG's across the country. I tried to find Hal on the internet, but never could find him, as it would be interesting to know who his TI contact was, as there might be some other goodies that the contact had access to if we were to track him down. Was anyone else here a member of the Atlanta UG back in the day and remembers seeing these games? The disks also contain that early version of Wing War, and early version of Buck Rogers, an early version of Treasure Island (with Cavemen sprites), plus tons more:

 

https://www.videogamehouse.net/treasureislandproto.html

 

I was especially intrigued with these disks since the TI community was not known as a big gaming community. And there seemed to be hardly any new finds of unreleased games (or even efforts to find unreleased games) until I joined the community in the late 90s (although I could be wrong about that, but that's how it seemed). So the fact that so many unreleased games were available at all, and especially so early on (1985), made me want to find the source even more so. Could it be that since Darryl was a teen interested in gaming, Hal Kam used his contact at TI to get some upcoming games since he was a friend of Darryl's dad? Maybe without Darryl we would never have seen the likes of Fantasy, Lasso, etc?

Edited February 7, 2021 by Toucan

[Toucan]

58 minutes ago, Toucan said:

I was talking to @Ksarul about this today and figured I would post this as it's not well known and maybe could lead to some interesting discussion. Probably about 20 years ago now, I received a bunch of disks containing released and unreleased cartridge dumps from a woman in Canada named Lucie Dorais (sp?). These disks contained games like Lasso, Wing War, Angler Dangler, etc. What was intriguing to me was that these disks were marked 1985, on a printout of the contents taped onto the disk sleeve. That was intriguing to me since 1985 was only 2 years after TI pulled the plug on the home computer, so these titles were discovered close to the time the TI-99 was still in production. Anyway, I decided to see if I could track down the source of these games, and who actually found them. As they seem to be the source for many of the unreleased dumps we have today (the disks auto load in XB with a nice menu BTW). So I talked with Lucie and she said she thought they were from the Chicago UG, which in turn I eventually tracked them down to the Atlanta UG somehow (forget how). Anyway, I came across someone who was a teenager while with the Atlanta UG named @dphirschler. He knew about these games (as I thought he would, as he was a teenager back then) and said his father had a friend by the name of Hal Kam (a member of the UG) who in turn had a contact at TI and was the source for many of the unreleased games that circulated in the UG back in the day (like the early versions of Wing War, Lasso, Fantasy, etc.). Apparently Hal Kam got these from his TI contact in 1983 while they were still in development and they eventually made their way around to the other UG's across the country. I tried to find Hal on the internet, but never could find him, as it would be interesting to know who his TI contact was, as there might be some other goodies that the contact had access to if we were to track him down. Was anyone else here a member of the Atlanta UG back in the day and remembers seeing these games? The disks also contain that early version of Wing War, and early version of Buck Rogers, an early version of Treasure Island (with Cavemen sprites), plus tons more:

 

https://www.videogamehouse.net/treasureislandproto.html

 

I was especially intrigued with these disks since the TI community was not known as a big gaming community. And there seemed to be hardly any new finds of unreleased games (or even efforts to find unreleased games) until I joined the community in the late 90s (although I could be wrong about that, but that's how it seemed). So the fact that so many unreleased games were available at all, and especially so early on (1985), made me want to find the source even more so. Could it be that since Darryl was a teen interested in gaming, Hal Kam used his contact at TI to get some upcoming games since he was a friend of Darryl's dad? Maybe without Darryl we would never have seen the likes of Fantasy, Lasso, etc?

BTW, if you're wondering why those cool cavemen were replaced with solid color sprites, it seems it made the game flicker too much. Should also mention these disks contain the speech version of "Demon Attack", which is where I got that from.

Edited February 7, 2021 by Toucan

[Tursi]

Don't know about the history, but I did know Lucie! She was the final president of the Ottawa TI User's Group while I lived there, and we used to do monthly meetings at her apartment. She had a regular column in the Newsletter called Fast Extended BASIC and also did many of the cover pages (all of them while I was a member!)

 

 

[ti99iuc]

Thanks @Toucan for all the story explained. I always really like to read these details of how things happen. Very interesting all! So cool!

[sparkdrummer]

Lucie did quite a few articles for Micropendium as well. 

[+dhe]

I purchased her 80 column programming system when she left TI land. She wrote a good number of articles o XB programming for the Ottawa Group.

[ti99iuc]

so, she is Lucie among other men  

 

Probably she is on Facebook too:

[Tursi]

Yep, that was the last issue in '95. I had a video digitizer on my Amiga and used it to import people's pictures. That's Peter Arpin, who ran the BBS, Lucie Dorais, as President, myself as newsletter editor, and Jeff Brown, who was still contributing a ton. Someone has edited out Lucie's little frog at the bottom right, who graced every cover in some form.