| Posted By
Csabo
on 2013-12-18
03:03:17
|  MCG's Treasure
 Recently registered but long-time Plus/4 enthusiast MCG sent us some programs that were missing from the database. Please allow me to editorialize a bit:
One in particular, A Sötét Jövő, is especially a happy find for me. There's a few reasons: the author is from my hometown (Eger). I like adventure games (and judging from recent forum threads, I'm not the old one!). But mostly, because this game was "lost" for so long.
We all had different childhoods, but most of us are here on this site because of nostalgia. For many of us Hungarian folks, CoV (Commodore World) was an important part of our lives. I religiously bought every issue, and I remember that many of us lamented the eventual end of the Plus/4 section in the magazine. In issue 24 of the magazine, the solution to this adventure was listed. I didn't have the game myself, but I didn't have that many "contacts" back in the day. (Remember, this is pre-internet times, so all scene software was spreading via snail-mail.) I figured I'd eventually get it.
Fast-forward to the era of Plus/4 World: it seems that we've looked though everyone's disk archives, and this game is just gone... Along with quite a few others. I personally thought that it's lost forever, since the author himself (Jakec) confirmed that the didn't have it.
That's where our friend MCG comes in :-) He just simply had the game! Rediscovering something like that, 22 years after it's release, is great in my opinion.
Besides that one game, he sent me a nice big batch of files, including this own program archive listing. This was at the end of October, and with "lightning" speed, the programs are already up. Well, a few things slowed me down. First, I created a page specifically for checking collection listings. It's not very fancy (quite the opposite), but it can be found here. The idea is simple, copy/paste a list of PRG files, and the page will tell you which ones we have and which ones we don't. Matching programs by filenames requires the database to be 100% up-to-date and correct, but that's probably impossible. Nevertheless, if someone wishes to use it, it's there, you can contact me for more details and/or feature requests.
The other thing where I bogged myself down was that his programs included 10 versions of Formula 1 Simulator, (1-10). After long-time gentle nagging from Gaia, I picked up Visual C# and the first small program I wrote in it was a utility that can draw the scenery and display the track from the game. (You can read more on that in this forum thread.) Armed with this utility, I was able to sort all of them; it turned out that only one was completely new, the others were variations of the existing programs.
Finally let me mention two more programs: Microdemo II was also a long-lost demo from CSM. Farm Song 4 requires viewer discretion, and I'll reserve judgement, but this was mentioned on the forum 7 years ago, and well, now we have it.
Big thanks to MCG for these! More will likely be forthcoming, so be sure to keep an eye on the New Stuff section.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2013-12-19
03:03:17
 | Re: MCG's Treasure
Microdemo II is a most wanted one, great!
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Posted By
Jakec
on 2013-12-19
04:45:53
| Re: MCG's Treasure
Wow! Nice work.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2013-12-19
08:51:37
| Re: MCG's Treasure
Hey Jakec, that's all you have to say? It's your baby after all  (Ha akarsz írj magyarul, majd lefordítom.)
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Posted By
MCG
on 2014-01-23
15:18:42
| Re: MCG's Treasure
To be continued... 
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Posted By
Luca
on 2014-01-23
16:06:19
| Re: MCG's Treasure
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