I've got some very good news for you all.
During this week off, I started to develop the desire to get back into the blog. I have some new ideas that I want to try out, which you'll see once I release the Game of Hangman article. During the process of working out one of these new ideas, I had a breakthrough. I'd been messing around with a PDP-10 emulator, seeing if I could get an old BASIC game to work, and I was able to get it working after a few hours of working my way through incredibly obscure and opaque information and online forums. Nobody's made any clear documentation about getting these old games to work, which is mightily frustrating. There was a lot of junk to sift through to get the gold nuggets of information I needed. I had looked into old computer emulators a long time ago, but the lack of clear, non-technical documentation kind of scared me off, if I'm being completely honest.
So what? I got an emulator working and played a game on it. Who hasn't?
Well, this is actually huge. It's huge because the game I got running was one I considered missing on my master list. What this means is that the floodgates could possibly be opened for restoring these "missing" games into a playable state, provided the BASIC compiler plays nice with me. As of writing this, I haven't experimented with other games yet, but I do believe that I can get most - if not, all of them - running.
This has massive ramifications for the blog moving forward. In a twist of irony, we must now move backwards to move forward. I had been considering a revisit of my Prehistory series, and revisiting my oldest articles. This new development now pushes that into far more pressing territory for me, as there are a few dozen games that I previously couldn't play before due to my lacking knowledge. With this new knowledge, I can restore some of the older games, and give them some time in the spotlight. This includes a bunch of the missing games from the original edition of 101 BASIC Computer Games.
I'm still considering what this all means going forward. I know for certain that I won't be redoing any of the BASIC games I've already covered. I think that's fairly redundant. I may just do a rescore in the background as they come up, but no fresh articles for them. For all the earliest games, I want to revisit them in full, as I grouped games together in my early days, and I really wish I didn't. But, it gives me an opportunity to revisit them and give them a properly well-researched treatment.
What this all means timing-wise is uncertain for me. I still have some significant personal stuff to deal with, so it may be a couple of weeks still until the blog gets back online. I'll be testing some more games, and experimenting with new ideas in the meantime when I have time to do so. But, suffice it to say, I'm pretty excited about the future of OGC.
This will probably be the last update I give before the blog comes back online. I just wanted to write and give an update on where I am with the blog - and just because I'm bloody excited about this new knowledge!
Anyway, that's all I wanted to share in this update. I hope you are all doing well, and God bless.