20 replies to this topic

[Opry99er]

So I had an opportunity to go and play with my gear at my sister's house today... It's pretty rare that I get the opportunity to mess with my gear, so I was pretty excited. =)



I went through a couple boxes of my undocumented stuff and found some very cool books which I put on one of my three shelves.



I found one book in particular that really interested me... A book called "Time Lost." It's a comic book/novella about a space journey that goes bad.





I looked deeper, and each chapter of the novella is followed by a TI program listing!




So, I read through it and determined that I haven't seen any of these programs online anywhere... I haven't even seen one of these books before. Does anyone know anything about these graphic TI program comic/novellas? It seems like a fantastic way to do a release... I found it very inspirational. =) Anyway, here you go... I haven't had time to type any of these games in yet, but I imagine they're pretty basic... (pun)

Anyway, this is what I wanted to share. =)

Edited by Opry99er, Tue Nov 9, 2010 2:18 PM.

[Opry99er]

By the way, I tried to resize these but Photobucket screwed me. Sorry for the giant sizes.

[snume]

Sweet. Now you need to scan it and make a pdf to put in the library When you get a lot more free time, that is.

[Opry99er]

I was thinking about scanning it--- but I dont have a scanner. I want to type in all the programs and post them somewhere--- but I am tied up with "Carl" right now.

[sometimes99er]

Amazing. And very interesting.

[Opry99er]

So I was Searching for information on this book on Google, and NOTHING. I searched on the OLUG and on wiki... There is nothing anywhere. So--- I'm guessing nobody else has one of these? It looks slickly produced, so I imagine there were quite a few made.... But not finding any info is vexing me... Are there other books in this series?

[snume]

Who is the publisher Owen? <edit - Oops! I looked again and it's Que -edit> And the Author(s)? I recall having a bunch of program books but nothing quite like that.

Edited by snume, Tue Nov 9, 2010 4:28 PM.

[Vorticon]

Opry99er, on Tue Nov 9, 2010 4:07 PM, said:

So I was Searching for information on this book on Google, and NOTHING. I searched on the OLUG and on wiki... There is nothing anywhere. So--- I'm guessing nobody else has one of these? It looks slickly produced, so I imagine there were quite a few made.... But not finding any info is vexing me... Are there other books in this series?

It appears that these books were made for a variety of platforms including the VIC 20, C64, Atari and Timex-Sinclair. Amazon actually has a copy of the TS version on sale. The TI version seems to be pretty rare, so I think you have a very nice find here. If you can find someone to scan the book into PDF, that would be awsome

[Opry99er]

Walid...I'd be happy to send it to you if you have a scanner. I would really love to see it online for everyone to enjoy.

[InfernalKeith]

I've had a couple of those before, and have one on my shelf now. I think I may own the Vic 20 one as well. I believe it was intended to be a series, but like so many 1983 things, fizzled after the first one. I was thinking of letting my son take a whack at it as he worked on his programming skills, but after a brief flare of interest he got bored and hasn't wanted to work on it as much lately, so we never did type the programs in. Definitely a cool concept though, and right in line with the "type in and run" mindset of the day.

It's not a kids' thing, but I have a really good book by Tim Hartnell about creating adventure games on your computer -- it has a few different adventures that you build onto, map out an area, add treasures, weapons, etc and then run. The last one is fairly complex, though its commands basically end up being moving in a direction, (f)ight or ®un, picking up treasures and taking inventory. One far-off project idea of mine is to enter the game code as-is, then trick it out and make a much more involved adventure out of it.

LOVE old computer books. So much cool knowledge locked away, of interest to so few...

[Opry99er]

Hey Keith... Do you have a scanner? Any chance you could scan the book and post it online--- save me some postage sending it off to be scanned...

[jchase1970]

I remember having one of these books, but I don't remember which one. I think the programs helped you make decisions in the book, if the program would tell you what page to goto next in the story.

[adamantyr]

Yeah, I got two copies of Timelost, both for the TI. I never knew they published it for other computers, I've only ever seen the TI ones in used bookstores. Weird!

Adamantyr

[Opry99er]

Very cool stuff!!! Glad to know others have copies! Have any of you ever typed in the programs?

[InfernalKeith]

I own a scanner, on my all-in-one printer, that I have yet to fire up and try out. Unfortunately, the best way to get a good scan would be to cut the binding so the pages could lay flat. I'd be willing to do that if I found another copy (actually, I think they were going fairly cheap on Amazon, since I don't think anyone knew they existed...). Let me try to scare up another copy and if I can, I'll sacrifice one for a good scan.

[Opry99er]

That's awful kind of you, Keith. I'd send you mine to cut up, but I kind of hate to lose my only copy. Good luck finding another copy.

[Vorticon]

Opry99er, on Tue Nov 9, 2010 4:33 PM, said:

Walid...I'd be happy to send it to you if you have a scanner. I would really love to see it online for everyone to enjoy.

I do have a scanner, but I'd be hard pressed unfortunately to find the time to spend several hours scanning each page manually

[OX.]

Just realised It's on this site (link from another thread) - http://pergrem.com/tibooks/

[matthew180]

Thanks OX, I was going to post that link. I saw the book the other day on that site. I didn't know what it was and I was short on time, so I didn't download it. The books that I did download from the site were good quality.

To any one else thinking about scanning books, check out the open source book scanner. It is very cool and I'm working on a setup for myself. Vorticon, that magazine article I "scanned" for you a few weeks ago was actually imaged with my digital camera. It let me keep the pages flat and not hurt the magazine. It was also faster than a scanner.

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

[orion1052003]

I've talked to the author of Timelost! on e-mail. He says there's another whole book, unpublished. He said it would be hard to publish it because the company owns the rights to it.

James

[Vorticon]

matthew180, on Sat Oct 8, 2011 8:33 AM, said:

Thanks OX, I was going to post that link. I saw the book the other day on that site. I didn't know what it was and I was short on time, so I didn't download it. The books that I did download from the site were good quality.

To any one else thinking about scanning books, check out the open source book scanner. It is very cool and I'm working on a setup for myself. Vorticon, that magazine article I "scanned" for you a few weeks ago was actually imaged with my digital camera. It let me keep the pages flat and not hurt the magazine. It was also faster than a scanner.

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

This looks like fun! Certainly seems better than using my standard flatbed scanner...