Forums > Game Forums > Star Lanes > Who authored the game
Greg Evans on 7/8/2013 5:29 AM · Permalink · Report
I hate to blow someones cover here, but I wrote Star Traders as a rewrite of the Apple II game Star Lanes. I added a few improvements and have the original code which was written in GW Basic and then updated in Microsoft Quick Basic. I have many witnesses to this and whoever is taking the credit should bow out and admit the truth. It is not a major issue it is just the principal. I put in a lot of hours doing the program.
I also authored Main Menu for the IBM clones of the day that made it easy for anyone to run up to 100 programs in two or less key strokes or for up to ten people in an office to share a computer with their own ten Function Keys programmed for the programs they preferred. It searched for the programs for you and even entered the path for you after you found the program. Main Menu also allowed you to program function keys to perform command line calls with up to five parameters. no other program allowed that either. I was tired of some of the other menu systems at the time that required you to enter a command line to run the program which most people had great difficulty with. I was working on a GUI interface when the first version of Microsoft Windows was produced (I still have my copy of Microsoft Windows - Blue Box and all) and I halted development as a result. This project ended its final commercial version with 22 thousand lines of uncompiled code including subroutines. It took about 6 months of about 12 hours a day. I seriously doubt that anyone really cares or may even read this, but I feel better now. Thanks for allowing me a voice.
Indra was here (20752) on 7/8/2013 10:49 AM · edited · Permalink · Report
We have a fetish for quality content, so you might want to update the game information here. Only problem is if you can provide a source we can verify or else any information you provide would be stuck in limbo.
Pseudo_Intellectual (66423) on 7/8/2013 12:51 PM · Permalink · Report
From the looks of things the version we have here (claiming to be by "Phoenix software") is in pure GW-BASIC. As I noted in another thread here, I learned about the game in a TRS-80 Coco version ported by a third party -- is it possible there were multiple MS-DOS ports? (Yes, admittedly but the odds that they would end up with the same new title is quite low.)
The problem with games distributed as source code is that true provenance is easily modifiable by anyone who wants to insert themselves into the game's lineage -- low-hanging fruit for any would-be cracker. I don't see credit information in the screen shots I took, but user Rafael may know more about the validity of the source they made references to when contributing the credits here.
Kabushi (261374) on 7/8/2013 12:58 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]I don't see credit information in the screen shots I took, but user Rafael may know more about the validity of the source they made references to when contributing the credits here. [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]
It's from 1999, meaning no source, no images, nothing that could verify it's validity.
Pseudo_Intellectual (66423) on 7/9/2013 3:03 AM · Permalink · Report
Well, Raph has continued contributing to the site as recently as this year, we could ask him to think back 15 years ago to the last century and remember what his source was 8)