Troy Rutter's Programming Projects

During the "Golden Days" of my Commodore enthusiasm, I ventured into the world of programming. Although I was still in high school, some of my projects got to be well distributed and survive today. Sadly, some of the other ones and ones that were "works in progress" were sacrificed to the C= gods and whomever brought that C128D system in Ames, Iowa at our garage sale had or has most of these.

Some highlights were:

"Bash Yer Brains!"
This one still survives and I will be adding some screen shots soon. This was a project I did with my partner in crime, Jason Moore. I was responsible for most of the machine language backend, and Jason did the BASIC code that hooked in and called my ML. We quickly established "Tar-Jam" software with this release.

BYB was a trivia game that allowed you to answer questions by using the function keys. It had several modes both "polite" and "rude." Ie: "You are stupid, the correct answer is..." you know, fun stuff like that. In addition to the basic game and the sample questions we created (Star Trek and Dr. Who were the first sets) we also tapped into what we had HOPED would be a great user addition - the ability to create your OWN questions and send them to your friends.

This worked a little, and a few user-made question sets were uploaded to Q-Link, but it was never as popular as we wanted. But it was still a great feeling to do something this complex.

Stat!
Stat was our second release and the first (and only) time anybody ever sent us a $15 check for the shareware version. It also still survives and I will make it available soon. In essence, it was a baseball stat program that calculated the usual batting averages, slugging pct, hits, runs, single, doubles... you get the idea. I included sample data from the Little League team I coached with the program. There were a ton of math routines in this one and it was very fun to create.

UltraSID Player
I touted this for a loooooong time on Q-Link, but unfortunately with Q-Link being dissolved and my own C= enthusiasm going down (gasp) I never quite finished it. For those unfamiliar with the Compute! SID Player archive format - there were several archives that worked like the common ZIP format today. These were SAL (song and lyrics(words), MSW (music, stereo words), PIL (Picture, song and lyrics) and others. Unfortunately, to play these files on Mark AD's Stereoplayer 10.3, the files had to be dissolved into their original parts - making 3 files (sometimes 4) for each song.

When SuperQ premiered, all of a sudden we could play music in chat rooms - but not only that we could play the mono side of an archive. So I thought... hmmmm. So I tore the different archives apart and found out the data really wasn't compressed. The data was simply strung together and separated by a couple of bytes that told how long the next part was. With this knowledge in hand, I actually made a SID player, using the original Source from Craig Chamberlain, and created the first UltraSID demo for a few people in the Music Connection area.

I don't remember what they thought of it - but I think they were intrigued enough to humor me. It wasn't much to look at. It brought up a directory listing of SID archives on the disk, let you choose an archive, and then it played the file (if a stereo file it even played the stereo part!) and showed the header block. I even got it to print out all of the words (albeit not in time with the FLG command.) To me, it was a tremendous opportunity to redefine the SID community. I think I tried to hook up with Mark and/or Craig at that time but don't remember getting any kind of encouragement. And, like I said, Q-Link was dissolving - files were suddenly disappearing out of the libraries as AOL added more and more (hmmmm) and at that point I believe I said... so long.

BUT... it is something I always look back on with pride. It would have been great.

MORE COMING SOON!

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