Wanderland Lore [$08]

More about Wanderland Lore [$08]

Eventually the system became so popular it was time for an upgrade. We got the old DEC mini from the college we went to, via a second-user electronics delaer, for £500. It was an enormous thing, taking up a whole room. (It was later donated to Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes.) Anyway, it is now about 1988, and we've hardwired the heavy-duty mains cable straight into the fuse box on the wall (don't try this at home!) and lap-linked the game data across to the 70 megabyte (!) washing-machine-sized hard disk. We still used the Atari 800XL as a multiplexer / front end processor initially, until we sussed out the TTY driver code in IAS (the operating system). Anywooee, the game merrily runs for a year or two, until eventually the hard disk has a head crash. By now, the genre is pretty much obsolete, as PC's with ray-traced 3D adventures are just around the corner, and the Internet will replace the telephone network. (Next Episode: 0898 voice-oriented gaming) [TO BE CONTINUED]