Coobird’s Blog

Cannons for Windows is one of those classic “tank firing a cannon ball at a target” game. This is one of the older versions of the game which was based off of code handed to students attending a after-school computer club when I was 5th grade. We were told to follow a series of directions on paper and copy down the source code into a form in Microsoft Visual Basic. Most of the code dealt with the projectile motion and the target hit detection, something that you wouldn’t expect an elementary school student to come up with on his or her own.

My version added a few “features” such as wind which would push the shell back toward the cannon. The wind was adjusted by sliding the scroll bar to the desired wind strength. Also, a picture box was added next to the wind scroll bar which would show a drawing of wind blowing on a house. The problem with that feature was that it only changed the drawing when the user clicked on the box and had a floppy disk with the drawings of the house in various wind levels. Of course, all these were a result of not really knowing much about events, properties of controls, etc. (But then again, can you expect too much out of a 11 year old kid?)

• Language: Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0
• Date: March 1995
• Platform: Microsoft Windows 3.1

Luckfinder 2 was a text adventure game where the player goes through a pretty much pre-determined route with very little deviations from the one-dimensional game play. (Basically one had to just remember not to go back the same direction, i.e. if you went south in the last move, just don’t go back north.)

At the time, I was playing a text adventure game called Wishbringer by Infocom, and was influenced into writing a game that was similar.

The game was written in QBasic around 1994. I remember writing this on my father’s 386 Toshiba laptop, back in the days when 486 desktops were prominent. Pentium-based computers were available, but those computers were top-of-the-line and were very expensive. If memory serves right, the fastest x86 processor at the time was a 66 MHz Pentium.

(If it weren’t for the horribly broken English, I would show the introduction, but as I said, it’s horribly broken English, so I’m too embarrassed to show the introduction screen. End of story.)

• Language: Microsoft QBasic
• Date: 1994?

Programming has been my hobby since I was in elementary school. I started out watching my friends who were writing programs by pecking at the keyboard of the 386 machines at school. This is back in the days of DOS, where most programs were still being written in text mode and graphics were primative. (In retrospect, graphics in DOS was really awesome. The ability to directly manipulate the graphics adapter is not possible with modern operating systems.)

I haven’t had much formal education in computer programming except for a semester here and few quarters here, but it has been an activity that I’ve enjoyed for a long time. Most of my programming knowledge has been self-taught, but I really think I’ve benefitted from the few classes I’ve taken.

I’ll be posting some of the programs I’ve worked on over the years, along with some thoughts that come up.