The Program of the Month

(July 2017)

The good old days

Two weeks ago, we are sitting in the coffee corner with my good friends Maxime and Marcel. We are enjoying the rare phenomenon of sunshine in the Netherlands, and reminisce about our geeky childhoods...

Marcel recounts his TRS-80 and ATARI ST exploits; and the rockets he launched!

Maxime describes Minitel and PC speaker music; his BBS; and watching PC demos while listening to his Gravis Ultrasound.

I rant about ZX Spectrum and my (bordering on insanity) obsession on the Z80 and the Speccy's ROM. Then, after entering the Uni, my switch to the world of 8086... I describe the agonizing process of connecting to the (so few, at the time!) university modems - from where the treasures of the demoscene could be obtained at top speed, via sz . And share the shocking experience of my first sound card - listening late into the night to Purple Motion and Skaven, while watching Future Crew's Unreal - again and again...

Ah, those were the days.

And then I remember my first "publication". I tell my friends about how a Greek PC magazine at the time (26 years ago!) accepted a GW BASIC hack I did as the "Program of the Month"; and bundled it on the cover 5 1/4 floppy disk.

But - I have no proof of that anymore! That code is forever lost...

"Perhaps not", says Maxime.

Many French magazines of that era have been scanned nowadays; "Have you searched? Maybe the same has happened to your magazine as well..."

Could it be?

I return home, boot up my Arch Linux and search for "PC Master pdf" - asking Google for pages with Greek results only.

What!

Some people have indeed scanned all 150 first issues of the magazine, with the official blessing of the company that published it behind them!...

Oh God.

I register on the site... but what should I download? There are no covers here, and I don't remember the issue number!

I can easily write a one-liner to download all 150 of those .rar files, but that would be rude; these people gave me a gift, I am not going to abuse it.

I search again for "εξώφυλλα" (covers) of PC Master... and Google obliges:



There! Some other kind soul has scanned many of the magazine's covers - and amongst many missing issues, the one with the big-headed Alien makes my subconscious scream -

"That's it!"

PC Master, issue 24, November 1991.

Oh God, oh God...

Downloading that .rar file...

And there, there it is - they have uploaded the bundled diskette code!

$ rar l PCMaster024 . rar RAR 4.20 Copyright ( c ) 1993 - 2012 Alexander Roshal 9 Jun 2012 Trial version Type RAR - ? for help Archive PCMaster024 . rar Name Size Packed Ratio Date Time Attr CRC Meth Ver ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BAT2EXEC . COM 6272 4727 75 % 07 - 10 - 90 01 : 23 ..... A . 83BD5529 m3g 2.9 BC . EXE 7628 7473 97 % 08 - 02 - 91 15 : 31 ..... A . B8003477 m3g 2.9 BIGECHO . COM 461 373 80 % 12 - 09 - 86 13 : 31 ..... A . 70572480 m3g 2.9 ANIMATOR . BAS 3852 2031 52 % 23 - 07 - 91 11 : 07 ..... A . C3D9E567 m3g 2.9 ANIMATOR . DOC 3843 1984 51 % 15 - 09 - 91 19 : 23 ..... A . E83E02E9 m3g 2.9 CLUB . DOC 1729 782 45 % 20 - 10 - 91 15 : 52 ..... A . 8E72AEB8 m3g 2.9 MONEY . BAS 11155 3773 33 % 13 - 10 - 91 17 : 54 ..... A . BB656E00 m3g 2.9 MONEY . TXT 1792 599 33 % 14 - 10 - 91 00 : 43 ..... A . D180E3AF m3g 2.9 MOONDRIV . BAS 5884 3585 60 % 13 - 06 - 11 04 : 27 ..... A . 471A3A53 m3g 2.9 MOONDRIV . DOC 1494 786 52 % 13 - 06 - 11 04 : 38 ..... A . 8D83AE1B m3g 2.9 OROSKOPO . BAS 6753 1486 22 % 01 - 01 - 80 00 : 08 ..... A . 5BEF4387 m3g 2.9 OROSKOPO . DOC 768 504 65 % 01 - 01 - 80 00 : 31 ..... A . EA70E5EF m3g 2.9 DBLCROSS . EXE 58783 50213 85 % 22 - 04 - 91 21 : 56 ..... A . 9182B646 m3g 2.9 DISTYPE . COM 188 172 91 % 02 - 10 - 87 21 : 10 ..... A . 1B4421AB m3g 2.9 DRAFT . LQC 2108 851 40 % 27 - 06 - 88 15 : 06 ..... A . 40884C75 m3g 2.9 GALACTIC . EXE 51991 47636 91 % 08 - 06 - 87 03 : 12 ..... A . CD8F048B m3g 2.9 LETTER . LQC 5774 2011 34 % 27 - 06 - 88 15 : 05 ..... A . F7DA02FC m3g 2.9 LHX . EXE 14854 14371 96 % 15 - 04 - 89 17 : 14 ..... A . 3D73AE27 m3g 2.9 LQCHAR . COM 6375 4016 62 % 03 - 07 - 88 12 : 51 ..... A . AB214EA5 m3g 2.9 PCDISK24 . TXT 20386 8989 44 % 14 - 10 - 97 21 : 12 ..... A . 0FA26420 m3g 2.9 PCMASTER . MNU 1959 417 21 % 19 - 10 - 91 18 : 42 ..... A . 270A45BA m3g 2.9 PCMASTER . 24 7335 3105 42 % 20 - 10 - 91 15 : 31 ..... A . 74BC3CA5 m3g 2.9 SIMCGA . COM 7103 4327 60 % 15 - 10 - 87 02 : 02 ..... A . B06D0F1F m3g 2.9 SOL2 . CHR 12915 7149 55 % 09 - 04 - 91 21 : 19 ..... A . 3EE336AC m3g 2.9 START . BAT 937 436 46 % 17 - 10 - 91 01 : 04 ..... A . A51294EA m3g 2.9 TINY . CHR 8188 4082 49 % 09 - 04 - 91 14 : 54 ..... A . 2C397815 m3g 2.9 VIRSTOP . EXE 24279 22233 91 % 17 - 11 - 89 09 : 36 ..... A . 72732759 m3g 2.9 pcmaster024 . pdf 25551893 25365818 99 % 08 - 04 - 13 18 : 59 ..... A . 961392CA m3g 2.9 CLUB 0 0 0 % 27 - 07 - 13 21 : 42 . D ..... 00000000 m0 2.0 README 0 0 0 % 27 - 07 - 13 21 : 42 . D ..... 00000000 m0 2.0 PCDISK24 0 0 0 % 27 - 07 - 13 21 : 42 . D ..... 00000000 m0 2.0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 25826699 25563929 98 %

That ANIMATOR.BAS is mine!

My own.

My... precious!

...

I open the .pdf - and sure enough, there it is; "Eternal Glory" :-)



I have to - no, I need to run this!

DOSBOX! Now, now, now!

...

Oh wait - I also need GWBASIC...

Google, give me GW BASIC!

...

Will it work?

DOSBOX doesn't render Greek DOS codepages by default (of course not! what was it? something about codepage prepare ?)

Nah, never mind - I can't be bothered to hunt that down right now!

Run! Run! Run!

Ecstasy. Bliss. Heaven.

There's something in my eye.

Look away... :-)

Back to index My CV Last update on: Sat Jul 8 20:05:25 2017

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