Holy lord, that’s amazing!
The major and most long lasting impact of the PC Jr. was the introduction of keyboard snobbery among pc users.
I mean just look at this numberpadless abomination! After IBM gave us the true grail of the 5150, to make this!? I mean look at those cursor keys! After so many hours training our brains on the standard inverted T of the arrow keys to do this to us! As if that wasn’t bad enough they put in the big hooked enter key. You make us use blackslash to make you file system different, and then you move the backslash key and make the place where it used to be enter!? What sick individual designed this torture device?
And yet, this was the original PCjr keyboard that shipped with the computer the first 8 months or so:
After that, having functioning keys made that other keyboard seem like a dream!
Oh god! That is worse. It’s like the illegitimate offspring of an drunken inter-species encounter between a PET 2001 and a PC.
I never knew. I cannot unsee.
Hey, I had a PET 2001, too! My jr came with the revised keyboard, though.
Man, I never imagined someone in 2021 would still be interested In that patch I wrote back in CompuServe days. Most people back then were interested in using it to get the game running on EGA cards. I can’t believe anyone still has a PCjr, that’s wild! I sold mine more than 30 years ago.
Anyway, the file that @copeknight linked is a legit copy of my original CompuServe post. Try it out and let me know!
Before I moved to the U.S. in 2016 to take a job in NYC, I disposed of a lot of personal property. Amazingly, I did not dispose of the file with my original patch notes. I just found them. Here are a couple of pages:
Note the column of Forth code in the centre left of the page.
And another. At the bottom is a transcription of an email I received from one of the Starflight authors, Rod McConnell, when I asked him what the colour table values should be:
EA eventually did patch the game officially to provide EGA support. But their tech support staff used my patch in the interim. I received a letter from EA thanking me for my efforts and offering me my pick of any title from their catalog at the time. I don’t think I have the letter anymore, alas.
IIRC, I had to run a TSR program to get the CGA version to run on a Hercules card back in the day. Glorious orange!
I remember one of my earliest tastes of the glory of PC gaming was Wizardy 1 on a PC with a Hercules graphic card and we could never get it to fully work right. It was a long time ago but IIRC the game worked for the dungeon but the monsters had no graphics. I was amazed when I dscovered there was more to it. I think when we tried some Ultima’s they didn’t work at all either. After that I got my own box (well it was my moms dick of a boyfriend but he was too stupid to figure it out, but I digress ;-) ) and it was some sort of AT&T branded XT I think. It had some funky graphics too I want to say some Italian sounding manufacturer, Olivetti maybe. I think we could only ever get CGA going on it. That was my Starflight box and between it and Wasteland I became the sad backlogged hoarder junkie I am today.
This is amazing. You are all amazing.
Thank you so much for pointing me to that link. I hadn’t seen or tried it before. Unfortunately, when I followed the first step check the disk, the results I got indicate that my version won’t work with the patch.
That said, I still have hope I can get the game running one way or another. Believe it or not, someone is actually building SD card readers that plug directly into the PCjr cartridge slot. I’ve ordered one of those, and will see if the ability to communicate with a modern pc lets me get access to a patchable version. I just picked up Starflight 1 and 2 from GOG, so we’ll see if the version they’re selling works with this.
Meanwhile, in anticipation of getting this working, I hung the Starflight map up above my system. Should add a nice touch when playing the game. (totally ridiculous homebrew picture frame)
At least those keyboards had CTRL in it’s proper position…
Just saw this thread. So it appears the actual Starflight 3 didn’t get completed?
The kickstarter was pretty lackluster so it failed miserably.
Lackluster is overtly kind. It was a fucking mess of a thing. They had nothing at all to show, no roadmap or plan that they shared with people, and they barely did any updates. I’m still angry about it.
Ok, I’m pissed because I thought with this many new posts, there was good news about a Starflight 3 :(
You can still go okay the fan-made Lost Colony, which is still currently the closest thing.
There’s also this fan project in the works.
Are you talking about “Pulsar: Lost Colony” because that is the only space game by that name I can find?
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Agreed, I’ve looked at and ended up supporting a number of KS and this was one of the worst that I have seen. It was just terrible, I think I even told them so on the KS forums. It was a case of “If you announce it, they will come”. It’s as if they never looked at a successful KS before launching. Who knows, maybe they didn’t.