Back at the dawn of time (the 1980s) when the first desktop computers were appearing, Avalon Hill produced a series of games.
Written in BASIC, as the more-or-less common language of the various 8-bit computers of the time, they were pretty good games, given the limitations of the time,
Remember, 16Kb was a lot of memory for the time, and the processing speeds were a fraction of what they are today.
These were purely text based, not a graphic in sight
Never-the-less, me and my friends had a lot of fun playing them.
These games are pretty comprehensively Abandonware these days.
It occured to me that these games could run in a web page these days...
and so, I've started doing conversions to do just that.
NOTE: these are written in Javascript and run entirely within the web page. Reloading the page will restart the game.
This is a conversion of the
TRS-80 Model 1 version of Planet Miners.
This version is as close to the original game as I can get.
There are four families. Each can be either computer or human controlled. Human players take turns entering their commands. The ships left on Earth handle the politics...how well they do is reliant on the inidividual ship skill, so it's generally a good idea to leave your best ship on Earth, but different situations may reward different tactics.
This was one of the very early Avalon Hill games, heavily inspired by movies like Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe.
For all that it is a quite a primitive game, it remains tense and compelling.
This game pits the Bismarck against the British Home Fleet. Again, very old school, simple but compelling game play.
For those interested, the code is available on Github
Robbie Matthews, 2021