Forums > Game Forums > President's Choice > What platform?
Pseudo_Intellectual (66423) on 7/19/2013 7:28 PM · edited · Reply · Permalink · Report
To reiterate the trivia item:
"President's Choice was written in UCSD Pascal, which produces machine-independent, portable code. In contrast to a compiled program, this 'p-code' is interpreted at runtime by a virtual machine loaded on boot - the p-System engine. The full UCSD p-System IV was a self-contained OS and programming environment, available for a number of computer platforms and designed to easily port software across systems. IBM offered it as a choice of operating system for its original PC, but it was quickly forgotten as PC/MS-DOS won the popularity contest."
I submitted much the same information when I was documenting PC-DOS 1.0 but it had to be expunged as game-irrelevant. Is this basically the dividing line which separates the PC booter platform -- for games written for IBM PC hardware -- from the MS-DOS one?
I'm curious to know if there are more UCSD Pascal games out there, and if any CP/M games (the IBM PC's third optional OS) could also be played as booters. (Currently I've only been able to submit CP/M games as emulated on the iPad, which is more than a little convoluted.)
vileyn0id_8088 (21040) on 7/20/2013 3:11 AM · Reply · Permalink · Report
The "PC Booter" category is kind of fuzzy as a platform, but for it to make any kind of sense, it'd have to mean any PC game that comes on a self-booting disk and doesn't require an OS to be loaded, or provides its own "OS"/execution environment. I'm not sure in which context you mention PC-DOS 1.0, but if you mean DONKEY.BAS, that one of course requires Disk BASIC and has to be launched from DOS.
"Game-irrelevant" is anyone's call; I just figured that this gives some potentially interesting information on the game's place in a little-remembered corner of PC history, plus it kinda serves to explain the note on compatibility below it.
I don't know of any other UCSD Pascal games, though I bet they exist (I've seen President's Choice advertised for the C64 too, and google tells me that Wizardry I-V on the C128 also used the UCSD runtime system). Of course, the interpreters are still platform-specific, so it'd be easiest to deal with the games on that basis.
CP/M is probably a whole other can of worms, though... now you've got me curious about that too. Would be neat to know if any CP/M games ever targeted the IBM PC in a hardware-specific way, e.g. disk format, doing any sort of graphics, etc.
