Interview with BOB WITHERS

 

Bob Withers, currently aged 49 and living in Dallas, Texas, is the co-creator of those popular graphic adventures from Mark Data during the early 80's. I remember playing these adventures till all hours of the night, not giving up till I solved the next puzzle. I loved them! What many of us CoCo users don't realize though is that Bob later translated these adventures to the IBM PC but they did not achieve the same level of success as on the CoCo. Bob has these adventures, including the IBM PC versions, available for download off his web page.

 Programming Achievements

NOTE: All graphic adventures were co-developed with Steve O'Dea

How and when did you become interested in computers?

While in high school I took a brand new course offered in our school named "Data Processing". This was the late 60's so the course consisted of an IBM 082 card sorter, an 029 keypunch, and a 405 accounting machine. I can't tell you how many hours I spent wiring the logic board of that 405. Pretty mundane by today's standards but I was hooked and decided to make some form of computing my career.

What made you choose the Color Computer?

I had been doing work on earlier TRS-80 computers, the Model I & III. I'd developed some communication software and was asked to port one of the programs to the Color Computer. So I picked up a gray 16K CoCo1. I found the 6809 chip vastly superior to the Z-80's I'd been working with and just fell in love with it.

What computers have you owned and currently own?

I've owned most of the TRS-80 line with the exception of a Model 12 and 16. I also have 10-15 Macs and a couple of Apple IIgs machines. I have an Osborne I, a Kaypro II, and a Poqet handheld. I also have four Pentiums that are split between Windows and Linux. For a long time I was providing refuge to abandoned computers but I've run out of room and only take in pocket computers and the like these days. I probably have 50-60 machines stuffed in various places around the house.

What companies have you worked for?

- U.S. Dep. of the Army	I was a computer operator for mainframe systems.
- Chrysler Corporation	COBOL programmer for pre-production auto design system.
- Volkswagen	COBOL programmer for VW hourly payroll system.
- Texas Instruments	Mostly workstation and PC development. OS/2, Unix, and DOS.
- Knowledge Data Systems	Developed health care systems under Windows and Unix.
- Answersoft Software	Interfaced to PBX systems using LAN to Windows, OS/2, Unix.
- Mastercard International	Realtime middleware development under NT and Unix.
- MCI Worldcom	Team lead for data base development under Unix.

Were you an adventure game fan?

Yes, I love adventure games. Not that I'm that good at them but I just love to play them. I used to spend hours playing Colossal Cave and I still think it's one of the best I've seen. I ported a CP/M version of it to DOS once and really had a good time with it.

Why did you choose to create 'graphic' adventures?

Steve and I were both big fans of adventure games. We had played many of the Infocom games together and I had been riveted by the early Scott Adams adventures for the TRS-80 Model I. Steve had been playing several graphic adventures on his Atari 800 and wanted to do one for the CoCo. I agreed but I didn't like the way the Atari games kept accessing the disk drive during play. I suggested that we try to make as complete a game as possible that could be contained within RAM. This presented a lot of challenges along the way but made game play smoother and opened the market for graphic adventures to people without disk drives.

SHENANIGANS

What was your involvement with the programming of the graphic adventures?

At the time Steve and I were both mainframe programmers. We coded COBOL during the day and played with home computers at night. Steve is also a very talented graphic artist so he was responsible for designing and drawing all the game pictures. We generally would meet for an hour or two to layout a game map and discuss various traps and puzzles. We would each then work alone, I would write all the code to support the game and Steve would draw the graphics. As Steve finished each room he would give me the pictures along with any animation instructions and I would add them to the game.

What software tools were used to develop these programs?

All the CoCo games were written with the Macro-80C assembler package developed by The Micro Works.

Steve was using the Radio Shack cartridge Art Gallery for initial drawings and Micro*Painter for close up work. At first it was very tedious switching between these as the picture had to be saved, the cartridge switched, and the picture reloaded. I pulled the code from both of these ROM packs and patched it together so both programs would be in memory at the same time working on the same image. I used the CLEAR key to switch between Micro*Painter and Art Gallery. This worked great and really sped things up.

After images were drawn we used a small Basic program I'd written to compress them using a simple RLE encoding scheme and then write out the image using assembly pseudo-ops so it could be directly included in the source code.

Steve came up with an ingenious method of drawing the screens in small sections we called overlays. Each screen then consisted of a background and a number of small overlays. Overlays were also used for animation by placing them over top of each other at regular intervals. I was constantly amazed at how Steve could draw such nice scenes and have them compress down to almost nothing.

What was your favourite adventure of the series?

My personal favorite was Trekboer. I had just finished reading James Michener's "The Covenant" when we were starting it. We used some of the terms from the book in the game but in a futuristic setting.

How did you get into contact with Mark Data?

When we finished our first game, Shenanigans, I made a demo version that included four or five rooms. We dug out a Rainbow magazine and sent off a copy to 5 or 6 companies that were advertising CoCo software. We never heard from most of them although we did get a very nice letter from Tom Mix telling us that he was not interested but encouraging us to submit work in the future. The only positive response we got was a phone call from Ron Krebs at Mark Data. Ron had written the text versions of Calixto Island and Black Sanctum and was really excited about distributing graphic adventures. We made a deal right there on the phone and I've never regretted it. Ron and his wife Mona are wonderful people and Steve and I had a long and friendly relationship with them.

TREKBOER

What was the royalty scheme you had with Mark Data and how did you do financially with programming for the CoCo?

We received 30% of the net which Steve and I split evenly. For a couple of years the games produced a nice supplementary income but it was never anything that could support even one person.

Did you program for the CoCo primarily as a means of income or were you a hobbyist that found how to make money while having fun?

Programming the CoCo was always a hobby for me. The extra income was nice but really never amounted to as much as people would imagine.

Why did you leave the CoCo market?

At the time Steve and I left there really didn't seem to be much of a CoCo market. The CoCo 1 was stagnating and the 2 and 3 had not even been announced. Creating and testing the adventures took a lot of our personal time and we just decided the dwindling income wasn't worth it.

Do you feel software piracy was to blame for the "dwindling income" later on?

I expect it had some impact but probably not a major one. My guess is that we had just saturated our market and sales began to drop off. At the time, between the CoCo 1 and 2, I think this was happening all over. It was a major reason that Mark Data wanted to move more into the IBM market.

How did the decision to port the adventures to the IBM PC come about?

At the time I knew nothing about the IBM machine or market. Ron Krebs at Mark Data called me one day and said he'd like to have the games ported to an IBM machine. I said, "Sure". About a week later a big box arrived from Mark Data containing an IBM XT with a CGA card and a color monitor. It had 256K RAM and two 360K disk drives. I later bought this machine from Mark Data and I still have it sitting here in working condition.

I ran out and bought some books on 8086/88 assembly language and the IBM PC in general and started learning. I bought the IBM Assembler and started porting code. We didn't have any graphic tools for the PC and at the time Steve had moved on to other things and wasn't particularly interested in redrawing all the pictures. As a result I used the CoCo images adjusted for the CGA screen resolution. They looked OK but weren't great.

The IBM Assembler was the pits, it was horrible at assembling data pseudo ops which comprised a large portion of my code. It used to take a couple of hours to assemble one adventure! I later bought a version of MASM from Microsoft which eliminated this problem.

By the time I owned an IBM video card with a higher resolution than CGA the adventures were dead and I'd moved on to other things.

Are these adventures still available commercially?

No but they can all be downloaded, including source, from my web site. Adventure Survivors (email: gtch30b@prodigy.com) also sells disk and tape versions of them (and others) for media and shipping charges only. They also publish a nice, but infrequent, newsletter featuring game maps, gossip, etc.

What is your opinion on Software Piracy?

Well, of course, I think it's very wrong. I think the term piracy is far too romantic a title for this activity. It is theft plain and simple. To me there is no difference between stealing a program and stealing a book, or a painting, or a car for that matter. On the other hand I am violently opposed to copy protection. I was very upset when Mark Data decided to copy protect our games and tried hard to convince them not to do it. I believe copy protection punishes honest people while doing very little to stop piracy.

Did you ever consider going into game development as a career?

No, never. I'm just not much of a visual programmer. By that I mean that most of the work I do is server oriented, behind the scenes type of coding. I've never been very good at designing graphic displays. That type of disability would quickly kill a game writing career.

What are some of your favourite CoCo products of all time?

My favorites include Zaxxon,  Bedlam,  Tut's Tomb,  The Sands of Egypt,  Micro Painter,  Art Gallery,  Macro-80C Assembler,  Color Forth.

What is your opinion of the CoCo 1 that you were using?

I loved the 6809 and VDG chips. I hated the chiclet keyboard and bit banger RS232. I just thought the screen resolution was so-so, not really up to snuff with the Atari machines of the time.

As for the CoCo 2 and 3, I own a couple of each and, other than booting them up to see if they worked, I've never done anything with them. I was pretty much out of Color Computer development before the CoCo2 came out so I've never used either machine.

What was your impression of Tandy in those days?

I felt that Tandy was making a huge mistake in their efforts to stamp out third party software. Rather than working with developers to build a software base they made it hard to learn technical details. I always felt that Tandy wanted 100% control of all software and hardware for their machines. Looking back it's a real shame, had they produced an open system and encouraged third party development we might all be using "Tandy clones" now rather than "IBM clones".

Did you ever meet with any other CoCo industry "heroes" ?

Well, I know Tim Purves who developed a number of fine programs for Michtron (formerly Computer Shack). I sold a file transfer program called Color DFT to Gordon Monnier at Michtron and Tim took over it's enhancement. I met Tim once or twice back then, circa 1982/83. Then ten years later I accepted a job in Larkspur, Ca. and I find Tim already working there. We worked together for about nine months. He's a bright guy and an exceptional programmer.

I met Steve Bjork at a Rainbowfest once. I was a big admirer of his work and it was nice to meet him. We both thought he was a great programmer so we got along. :-)

I've met Lonnie Falk a couple of times. I've often heard people say that Lonnie was just a businessman in it for the money but I never saw this. Lonnie had a genuine fondness for Radio Shack machines in general and the CoCo in particular. For a number of years he was certainly at the center of the CoCo revolution and it would have been a very different community without Rainbow magazine.

I've never met Marty Goodman but I have spoken to him on the phone several times. It's hard to question Marty's impact on the CoCo community, his contributions are everywhere and continue even today. Marty once sent me a board to allow my CoCo1 to work with a color composite monitor. Marty, if you ever read this, thanks a bunch - it made all the difference in the world.

Do you have any interesting stories from your CoCo days?

Well, I recall one time we were at a Rainbowfest and Mark Data was approached by a group of people who made the Dragon. They were interested in distributing the adventures in the UK but they wanted a demo of the games we had available. I had never run any of the games on a Dragon, I'd never even seen one, but they assured me it was 100% CoCo compatible. I went up to a hotel suite where there were several Dragons setup with about 20-25 people gathered for the demo. I fired up the first game, I think it was Calixto Island, and the animation was running about 20 times too fast, I mean things were whizzing by so fast you could hardly make out what they were. Everyone in the room just stared dumbfounded at the screen until one gent, in a crisp British accent, said "Are they arcade games as well?". It turned out that I had based the timing for all the animation off how long the keyboard scan ROM routine took to poll for a key. The Dragon routine was much faster and caused everything to run fast. I was up all night switching all the animation to use the timer interrupt rather than the keyboard scan loop and the following day the demo ran much better.

Do you have any "philosophical words" to say about your experiences with the CoCo?

It was a great time, I've never been sorry I was involved. Back then people were intimately involved with the development of programs. They would agonize for hours over how to cut a couple of processor cycles. They also were generally very willing to share ideas and technical information. Today a lot of programming is done by drawing a picture of a screen and answering a bunch of questions posed by a software *wizard*. The wizard then spits out a program which generally operates in a manner completely unknown to the programmer. Somehow, I think we've lost an important part of the programming process.

I'm very pleased to see the CoCo hacker (original meaning) ethic still alive on the Internet. It's nice to know that the flame is still burning even if it isn't catching the world on fire.

Thanks for taking the time to conduct this interview. It brought back many fond memories that had been long forgotten.

Interview by Nickolas Marentes, October 1999.