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Manual Archive


Allan

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I may have started one of these years ago and forgot about it, but I have scanned many Atari 8-bit manuals and put them on Archive.org and thought I would make a thread to draw more attention to them.

 

Here are a couple I have done recently:

 

Super Mailer Plus by Royal Software

 

Proto's Graphics Machine by Educational Software

 

Ace of Aces by Atari

 

Gato by Atari

 

The Darkness Rises by Rainbird Software

 

On-Track by Gamestar

 

Dawn of Civilization by Superware

 

I will try to remember to add a post here when I add a new manual to Archive.org.

 

 

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On 11/6/2021 at 11:20 PM, Allan said:

I may have started one of these years ago and forgot about it, but I have scanned many Atari 8-bit manuals and put them on Archive.org and thought I would make a thread to draw more attention to them.

 

Here are a couple I have done recently:

 

Super Mailer Plus by Royal Software

 

Proto's Graphics Machine by Educational Software

 

Ace of Aces by Atari

 

Gato by Atari

 

The Darkness Rises by Rainbird Software

 

On-Track by Gamestar

 

Dawn of Civilization by Superware

 

I will try to remember to add a post here when I add a new manual to Archive.org.

 

 

Thanks Allan. Is the software for Proto’s  Graphics Machine in the preservation thread? I’ve had a physical copy of the manual for years but no software. 

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2 hours ago, spookt said:

Thanks Allan. Is the software for Proto’s  Graphics Machine in the preservation thread? I’ve had a physical copy of the manual for years but no software. 

Unfortunately I only got the manual with this collection.

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Here is Summer Games. A big Thank You to @abbotkinneydude for the original scan. I have been trying to finish off the XEGS series of manuals for years now. This one is rare for some reason. Best Electronics had copies of these for years but for some reason you rarely see this one come up for sale.

 

XEGS Summer Games

 

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Diskovery Reading Works- Time Zone Booklet might be a name for it..

 

they did a number of titles here's a write up that was in a publication about 'The Word Bird'....

       from....

Diskovery Reading Works series from International Publishing and Software, a Canadian company.

 

The bird pictured on the box of The Word Bird has a balloon filed with prepositions--on, in, beside, above--coming out of its mouth. It reminded us of our high school German teacher stalking around the room chanting "an auf, hinter, in neben, uber, unter..."

Yes, Fraulein Behrens had one way of teaching prepositions, and it was effective, but times have changed. Children learning about preposition in English today have a far more pleasant vehicle. The Word Bird is a delightful program that "focuses on the relationships between objects in space and the way these are described in English."

The disk includes three activities of increasing complexity which are chosen from the title screen by pressing the 1,2, or 3 key. All other action required of the player is executed either with the joystick or a strange set of keys. The keyboard control combination of left arrow (down), CTRL (left), 1 (up), and 2 (right), which did not correspond with the diagram in the documentation booklet, is one of the least logical we have seen, and we found that players had a much easier time with and preferred to use the joystick.

After a short practice session in which you master the technique of moving a rectangular frame around on the screen and positioning it over a word to indicate a choice, you begin with Activity I which asks you to compare a sentence to a picture on the screen and tell whether the sentence is true or not. You may see a picture of a castle with a road leading up to it. As you watch, a snake moves across the screen and stops alongside the road. The sentence under the picture reads "The road is to the right of the snake." You use the joystick to move the frame over the word "yes" or "no" to indicate your answer.

During play, the program selects randomly from a pool of five prepositions. When you have answered correctly with a given preposition three times, that word is removed from the pool and another is substituted. A total of 12 prepositions is drilled in Activity 1. The activity ends with a screen that reports the number of correct answers out of the number of attempts. The program then cycles back to the title screen to allow you to choose one of the other activities.

In Activity 2, a picture is presented. Then an additional object floats across the screen, coming to rest near something in the picture. You read the sentence below and decide which of two or three prepositions when inserted into the sentence will make it correct. For example, you may see an outdoor scene with a bird peeking out of a mailbox. You must theh decide whether "inside" or "on top of" makes the sentence "The bird is the mailbox" describe the picture. You must get each preposition right five times in a row to advance in Activity 2.

When you choose a correct answer in either of the first two activities, you hear a pleasant tune. A pencil then appears in the lower right corner of the screen and draws a red check mark. Finally, the message "That's right!" appears under the sentence. Incorrect responses evoke a "raspberry" sound, and the pencil draws an X. A sentence of explanation then appears on the screen.

Activity 3 asks you to make your own sentences. A picture is presented along with a skeleton sentence containing three blanks. Beneath each of the blanks are two words or sets of words that can be used to complete the sentence. You choose one from each pair and watch as the scene ("The boat is on top of the bird," for example) is created on the screen. We found that the sillier the sentences. the more our playtesters enjoyed the game. Documentation

The eight-page instruction booklet is a model of completeness. It begins by describing the rationable for learning the skills presented in the game: "Although our world is three-dimensional, we usually use only two dimensions to represen it...and to understand geometry, trigonometry, and geography, children must be able to recognize spatial relationships."

The next section describes the use of the joystick and control keys, and instructions for loading the program to follow. Unfortunately, there is a typographical error in the loading instructions for the Commodore 64, so a strip of paper detailing the correct command is inserted in the package. Although it is a standard command, this is a bad sort of error to find in an instruction manual.

The activites are described in a page and a half, followed by a page of suggestions for reinforcing the skills practiced in the activites--both with the computer and without. On the last page of the booklet we find a set of educational objectives that would satisfy any education professor. And we think that the program does an excellent job of satisfying those objectives Summary

The Word Bird is a unique program that drills several valuable skills at once. It teaches spatial relationships while encouraging the young reader to read carefully (even our adult playes made errors when they overlooked the word "not" in some of the sentences or failed to concentrate on word order).

The graphics are colorful and clever, and the vocabulary is varied enough to assure that children will not soon tire of it.

Our only complaints concern the two typos (loading instructions and control keys) in the manual. These can be corrected easily, and we hope they will be in subsequent editions of the program.

The Word Bird is a truly superb example of what educational software can be. We recommend it highly.

Edited by _The Doctor__
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22 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Yes I did, for some reason AtariAge did not put up my full text, give it a read. It's more properly named and some other information about another title from them is listed

Good. That was my goal. :) We can't trust one or two places to archive Atari stuff. They must be on many hard drives/storage devices.

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or best offer... I make offers now, even when they don't list it... just pm and go from there.

some people put OBO and won't come down a penny... it's a weird world... others just want to be done with the auction antics and are like, here dude just get this out of my hands I want it gone..

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