Subject:      Re: Game: "The tail of beta larae"
From:         paradise@netcom.com
Date:         1996/02/06
Message-Id:   
Sender:       paradise@netcom7.netcom.com
References:   
Organization: NETCOM On-Line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Newsgroups:   comp.sys.atari.8bit


In article ,
William Howald   wrote:
>I bought this many years ago and never could get it to work on any 
>machine. It will load the musical intro, then go on to the select 
>screen,the into a demo, but the screen then flashes/no sound then crash!
>It never has any disk errors...HELP! I want to play this game!
>(It looks a lot like a scramble clone)
>
>Aaron Howald

I believe you need to hold down the option key(i.e. make sure there are
no cartridges in the machine(including basic which is in ROM on some 
machines if you don't hold down option). If the game thinks there is
something fishy going on it will ignore the joystick and no music will play
on the main screen(I believe). It is like scramble, but nothing is fixed
in place, it uses probabilities and rhythm instead. Also if you have a virgin
disk and leave it unwrite protected it will slowly evolve and new 
objects 
will appear after you have had it for a while(But only a fixed number of 
them[didn't use GAs then]).  I wrote it on an Atari 400 with a cassette 
drive (no floppy, no hard disk) with little information available on the
Atari guts. I used an assembler on cassette, and had to spend a few hours 
saving my work each time I wanted to test anything. I also created a unique
musical language that Gary Gilbertson used to compose the music. All in all
I was very happy with it when I wrote it in 1982-1983. I lived in a plywood
shack on a bed livid green with mold, no running water[showered down at the
local outdoor showers at a beach], got power to run the Atari from my 
shackmate's jeep[you need one to get out in the country were that shack was]

         Best to all,
         Philip Price (Creator of a number of multiplayer noncommercial
                       mainframe computer games in the 1970's,
                       Creator of The Tail of Beta Lyrae,
                       Creator of Alternate Reality Series
                      )
-- 
                                             Philip Price
                                             paradise@netcom.com