Jeff Stanton's 3-D Skiing, full disk version

[Hot Rod <hotrod.apple2@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

Down to just a couple nibble copies left from the pile now.  One of the remaining was "3-D Skiing" by Jeff Stanton, from 1980.  Folks may be more familiar with Jeff Stanton from his book "Apple Graphics & Arcade Game Design", which was published a few years later.  Apparently he did write some games before the book.

I don't recall if file versions of these are around or not, but I don't recall seeing them with the title screens and such.  The disk itself was a protected DOS 3.2 disk, mainly just modified markers.  Getting it demuffined was easy enough.  But to make it just a bit more challenging, all the files are laid out as direct sectors (via TEXT file type, no loading address and length) and the code makes direct RWTS calls to load them (hard-coded in the code, not using the VTOC).  So I re-skinned it as a DOS 3.3 disk and left everything else where it was (other than tracks $00-$02, only 13 sectors per track, and the catalog starts on track $11, sector $0C).

The original disk had DOS 3.2 on it, and it had been modified to update to the changed markers, plus make direct RWTS calls to load the original NEWMENU.O program into $4000.  To work around that and bridge to DOS 3.3, I made a copy of tht file (as now HELLO), so it could run from boot still, but let regular DOS handle it.  This program then uses RWTS directly to load in the title screens and get the game selection, and then loads the games directly too. (Small interesting tidbit: it passes strings to display via the stack, then updates the return address to be past the end of the string. So code and text are inline. Neat.)

I can't think of what other games Jeff Stanton wrote, but at least this one's up on Asimov now.

]HR