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@@MichaelBattaglia Well, as mentioned at the start, I'm out of action with a bad cold. I brought the rest of the household down with it too despite best practices 🤧 As indicated at 12:00 this video uses a fair amount of AI to get it out of the gate. Achoo!
For me, 1985 when I was aged 16 and received my own first computer, an Apple IIc. I lost my mind and programmed it like crazy, including D&D rules and other role playing games popular at the time. Not to mention playing the games like Ultima 3 and 4 at 4am in the morning during the summer. Good times!
A catching story, I have to say. I hope you will eventually find out more about the mysterious MicroText and share it with us. And I hope you will get better soon!
What I found: Journal of Microcomputer Applications Volume 7, Issue 2, April 1984, Pages 167-188 MICROTEXT: a new dialogue programming language for microcomputers. Abstract MICROTEXT is a new dialogue programming language that has recently been developed by the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory. This paper presents an overview of the language, describes its mechanism of program creation and then provides some examples of its use in the context of dialogue engineering. You can find the text on Elsevier, I could not find an alternative location. Not sure if this is what you are looking for.
Nice reveal at the end Peri! I was thinking throughout the whole video that there was something off. I've got to say, AI is becoming scarily good. Get well soon
"'ve got to say, AI is becoming scarily good. " The cadence is off. Before the commercial, I'd come to the conclusion it was AI or Peri's cold was so bad he was using a device to breathe.
@_bob_8170 There was always the joke about "BOB"... (Battery Operated Boyfriend" - wink wink...) which could actually do very little.... but even BOB the Battery Operated Boyfriend... is fast becoming a reality... Maybe him them.
Back in the day when I played Elite, I wrote a database on the C64 that stayed in Ram, that had the statistics of all the ships so you could look them up. It would have been nice to have something like microtext perhaps so, I could've made rotating wireframe images of the ships that rotated and spun around on the screen above the text. A mate wrote a more advanced version that loaded the information of floppy, but since I didn't have a floppy drive at the time. . .
This was a really fun watch Retro Recipe.. It was fun watching you investigate on old hardware and programing language lately. Also hope you recover soon from your cold.
I have to say that I'm impressed that as a 14 year old in 1987 with a C64 you didn't make a copy of the disc... But on the other hand if you had then it might have turned up in a box somewhere and help solve the mystery!
That's a good point. I don't think I knew of a way to clone disks then as the 1541 was so new to me and I had it maybe 1, 2 weeks max. Plus I would never entertain such a devilish idea as copying someone's hard work 😇
@@RetroRecipes Had I been in your shoes I probably wouldn't have got to the point of making a copy either.... The idea of spending my money on a floppy disk so I could make the copy (even if I could figure out how to do it with just 1 drive) would have seemed a waste vs buying another game or saving the for the drive itself.
@@RetroRecipes Sometimes copying someone's work is also archiving their work. In hindsight this would have been one of those times, not all "copying" is evil.
I never got my hands on a c64 disk I didn't immediately want to copy 😂. Great story, sir. There are so many things lost in time. Wish I still had all the programs I wrote back then.
You are living proof if you dream when you are a child and you don’t loose that sense of wonder you achieve your dreams- it’s amazing to me how many things you loved become things you do now- very inspiring to the kids of today!
I so knew the voice was AI and i hope you are feeling better soon. I so hope something turns up about this as it would be nice to see what happend to it as i think if something like this may of got more it to doing programing (maybe). As always totally enjoyed the video and fingers crossed that something turns up, so until next time keep up the amazing work. You guys take care enjoy the weekend 🙂🙂
I think your stories are great. The world is full of stories and as my dad use to say "if you don't know where you have been how do you know where to you are going" thank you Fractic family 🥰
8:17 - "Ceefrax" - ooh, I see what you did there! ;) Don't understand why Knight Rider was shortened to 'knightrdr.' when 'knightrider' would fit... ;)
An idea to verify the tenants name. You know your own address at the time. Look for archived phone books from the time. Good luck finding more about that programming language.
@@RetroRecipes Any chance of relatives to reach out to or finding Bob/Robert himself? its unlikely but not impossible they might still own the same drive and disks you were using. Stranger things have happened.
Your teenage request for programs to run independent of C64 MicroText reminds me of the numerous requests for the same feature to be implemented in the Action! programming language for the Atari 8-Bit computer line.
Get well soon! Fourteen year old you was probably right and the whole thing was a bit useless without a stand-alone interpreter that could be distributed along with one's creations in MicroText. Without that, I mostly see educational uses, like an introduction to programming. But then again, back then it was common to just write something for yourself or your family and simply use it only on your family computer at home. Totally valid. Also, if I recall correctly, on systems without BASIC on ROM, programs were often just somehow bundled with the BASIC "package" somehow. I forgot how it worked for GFA BASIC on the Amiga, in which I definitely "released" (as in being able to give it to friends on a disk) some silly games. AMOS BASIC (Amiga, too) I think had a mechanism for creating a release built in.
I remember when zzzap, or c64 came with two tape cassettes which were transparent and had shiny metallic foil inside, one was red and the other blue. I thought that was the most futuristic thing ever. I was about 8.
Did a quick search in the British Newspaper archive. Found two references to Robert Watson who was an I.T. tutor at Spalding and another who was an office skills tutor in Kilmarnock in the 1980s. Both have photos so if you can remember what he looked like that might help ID him. OFC might someone else entirely.
My mother keeps telling me that it is very bad living in the past but I can't help it, the 80's were the best time to be alive and using Commodore's. I just want to go back.
I remember seeing magazine adverts for "White Lightning" when I was kid.. I think I owned a Vic-20 at the time and I used to drool over the promise of "game makers" that were available on the C64. Today, I am sad enough to own a copy of White Lightning and Basic Lightning, along with their awful red-paged manuals. Hehe.. I also had the same naive dream that when I bought a copy of Laser Basic (the successor to White Lighting) that I'd be creating "Ocean" games that would load with a Martin Galway SID track.. Boy was I easily misled as a kid. The power of marketing.. I may as well continue my "game making" rant .. lol.. I bought "Game Designer" for the Vic 20.. That was awful.. "Game Maker" for the C64... awful.. AMOS and AMOS 3D for the Amiga... did nothing with that while working in a supermarket to earn cash to fuel my Mini while at Uni.. I won't even mention what PC game dev tools I acquired and played with. Man I wish I was still 10, back in the 80's with all of that time to dream and do stuff. 40 years on we have so many cool things that are available and no time whatsoever to enjoy them. All work and no play..
Great story. I hope you get some good leads coming your way. As for your voice, the more i watched the video, the more i got a feeling that this was AI. AI has become great at copying people's voices but in a very monotone sounding way. All the best.
I hope you get well soon my friend, I had a bad cold over Christmas not good :( ... i remember a speech program i had on my BBC model B and had commands like pitch etc
I didn't see the twist at the end coming! 😮Excellent! 😊Peri, I hope you are better already. I just read a bit but it seems that was an advanced version of Microtext ported to the C64. Check the full text of Ian Bruce Jones' thesis "THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTERACTIVE VIDEODISC SYSTEM ", available online, for a summary on the capabilities of graphic-enabled Microtext 3. Also "The design and evaluation of a micro-computer based authoring system for trainers" (1983) by Bevan and Watson for the purpose of Microtext. I couldn't find any academic paper that may have used Peri's review, though.
4:10 I do remember typing a similar command back in late 1985 or early 1986. If I'm not mistaken, one of the numbers was for the octave. You would write couple of lines and then play it back. We also did some light graphical design, similar to LOGO. That was in an early high school computer lab in Eastern Europe. Some of the computers were older brands that I didn't know back then (but of course I knew all the Ataris, Commodores, ZX Spectrums, Amstrads, etc.). They were probably some local brands and or some IBM clones. Main attraction for me, of course, were games on ZX Spectrum that was there. We were allowed to play part of the time, but we had to learn some programming on these other machines. The club wasn't the part of the curriculum yet, but more of an after school club for students going to that school.
CJ, amongst other “more obvious” things, I’d like to thank you for re-introducing me to Level 42. I guess they were too advanced for my teenage ears back in the mid ‘80s when I first heard them. They are brilliant musicians, and “World Machine” is such a groovy album! OK, now I'm off to watch the vidio... 🏢4⃣2⃣
I do wonder if the request for (what is basically) a complier might have killed it. I could see if they were internally already arguing about that and a bunch of people told them it needed one, or just Bob made it sound like a lot of people complained, that could help push them over the edge.
There were fancier versions of BASIC on various platforms that had the exact issue: the program could only be run if you had that cartridge/program yourself. This was common practice at the time.
I wonder if (based on your review) they were working on a way to compile your code from Microtext out to a standalone PRG file and never got it finished. It was a valid complaint, and IIRC other creation tools (like Pinball Construction Set) allowed you to save your work into a standalone/runnable format.
@@RetroRecipes It might be hard to find out anything because all people who were involved in that project are in an elderly care home at least and some might suffer from a (un)healthy dose of dementia by now. Sadly, you are 10 years too late with your endeavour.
I hd the whole collection Zapp 64 - I had them stored around my dads house, when we were clearing out the house after he had passed, I though - I won't be needing them again - and binned them !
It was very common back in the day to over-highlight a program that never got officially released or recorded....sometimes, when it comes to programming languages, they would get absorbed into other projects. Fortran already had the ability of programming using common words, and languages exploded around that time. The other issue is that if a program didn't catch even a little steam while others overshadowed it, then it would get "lost to history." I remember owning a digital "typewriter" that you can edit/save/load documents onto floppy disks before you would print them to the paper feed, all done digitally, and used your TV as the display....it also had a couple games you could play on it, but it came with no how-to material, and I can't even remember the name of it anymore. It literally died to history because of how fast computers grew. I think the 86 processors and first windows came out like a year after or something. Computer science went way too fast, I still miss the days of asm programming the c64 in my bedroom when I was about 10 years old (prodigy?). I still have that big blue book sitting right next to me.
There's still teletext in Hungary, but not a lot of people use it nowadays. The stories you have surrounding the C64 are amazing. [Sigh] It was so cool to be a kid in that era...
Here in the Netherlands it is used by 5 million people each day (traditional TV and mobile apps combined). It's so popular that stopping cannot even be considered. A recent problem was that the editing software did not run on modern computers, but public broadcaster NOS did decide to develop new 64-bit software to do the old 8-bit teletext :) The switch to the new software did take place only a few weeks ago, so I guess they will continue with teletext for many years to come.
During the whole video I had the suspicion that it was an AI version of your voice doing the voice over. Even though AI voice has come a long way, it still sounds monotonous compared to a real voice. In this case it's a great replacement for if you have lost your voice but still want to make a video. Much better than other YT channels which just cram out videos about unbelievable technological advancement pasted on a collage of stock footage. What I mean to say is , yet again, you show us that you create quality and creative content with tools which others just use to shovel out quantity over quality.
1987, It could be bad timing. That is right around time of 16 Bit systems and MicroTEXT sounds like it was very much tied to the 8 Bit machines it was written for. What I mean is moving something based on text you type on the screen and then putting in a command would be less useful with the kind of graphics the 16 bit machines could give you. Also your 14 year old pointing out that the programs didn't run by them selves, is another 8 bit versus 16 bit issue. Or to say an interpreter versus a compiler language issue. In the 8 bit days almost all BASIC languages were interpreter languages and the only reason they didn't need a disk to load the lagnuage first was because BASIC was in ROM. I think there is a C language for the C64, but the memory resources and required might be hard to do in 64k of ram to compile a program, moreso than having an assembly language on the C64 and a lot more complex to write a compiler than an interpreter. I remember such languages like LOGO on the C64 having the same requirements as MicroTEXT, so maybe while a valid point, it was just no something the programmers had the resources to do on that 8bit platform and just using Assembly to program with lesser tools that programmers on 16 platforms later have. Many C languages were written inside another version of C for instance instead of assembly for example.
You're right. The Amiga 500 was released just a few months earlier, and would've gained some momentum by the time I beta tested MicroText. It's very likely they decided to focus on Amiga instead, hence the later laserdisc controller version made with Ariadne. We shall see!
If people are still turning up lost Atari 2600 prototypes, C64 Microtext is out there. It probably has a compiler. Sounds like it works like the ACTION! programming language by Optimized Systems Software for the Atari 8-bit. Though it came primarily on cartridge.
What is up with the full justification in the editor screen of your review? Looks like it's trying to balance letters and spaces 50/50 or something. 'True' full justification would put more words on a line as they're readily available.
Yeah, this is probably the best way to find more info. It's an intriguing thread from the potential history of the C64 that wasn't. Have you reached out to Frank Gasking from Games That Weren't? This is exactly the sort of thing in his ballpark. It's not a game, but it IS lost software at its base. Aside from that, the clamshell of Ghostbusters brings back SOOO many memories. I got it as a gift for Christmas 1984. So many good memories. Plus the game itself still holds up as a milestone of the time, AND it was by Activision. A company that has survived long enough to subjectively go from hero to villain. History tends to look a helluva lot different if you actually experienced it, but thus is life.
Loved my c64. I had the terminator 2 pack that came with the game in cartridge fourm that you stuck in the back, and it still took ages to load, but it was pretty cool
that manual with the spiral binding I saw that out at SWIC in the late 1990s it was a discard at the library because the college got rid of the 64s prior to 1990 hence got rid or discarded manuals in favor of Windows that they would be forever buying upgrades for but should have kept IBM and the Commodore and the Chromebook but that is just me but you might want to check with some of the colleges or the computer institutes they might have some idea truth
Bob might be keeping a low profile, did he use thumbtacks to put up posters then hide the damage with toothpaste? Perhaps you should reassure Bob that any party related damage to the flat is forgiven.
I was a ZZap!64 subscriber and had various cheats published, many with tiny machine code loaders to break into the games to allow people to enter pokes, those were the fun old days.
Loved my Commodore 64 back in the 80's. I remember my parents buying me the Commodore 64 Programmers guide. It had about a thousand pages in it. I would be up till 3 or 4 in the morning learning to program.
perry, your voice sounds the same you're fine but yeh moon is pulling some Gs causing Sniffles. my mother sold my C64 and prob sold my Vic 20 but told me it was stolen
I enlisted in the military in the early 80's. The first time I came back home on leave, I ran straight to the computer desk and promptly dug out all the simple video games I had previously programmed... on cassette tapes. I'll never forget how upset I was to discover that the tapes were no longer compatible with my mother's new C64.😭😁
Thank you for your service. Whatever machine they were written on, if you still have them it's likely you could still load them up by reacquiring said computer on fleaBay 👍🕹
@@RetroRecipes You're welcome... and no, I do not still have them. But, just to give you an idea of the dinosaur of a machine my mother had prior to the C64- and I remember this specifically- it was a Texas Instruments TI-40!😆
Hi Good Story - puzzle Maybe it just never took of, or was used somewhere else as a scripting language or even used in part on the TED chip or the newer 128 version of basic As for AI voice, i hope one day they will bring out 2 of my favourites Tom Baker ( 4th Doctor ) Mel Oxley ( Voice of SID in UFO )
"Programmers in Ferraris" reminds me of the early nineties, Lawrence, KS. You'd see a number of expensive sports cars in front of bars on weekend nights with license plates bearing some variation on "NEWTEK" -- it was a hotter scene there than Topeka, I guess. The one specific car I remember was an NSX, the only one I ever saw in person. Don't know which principal owned it . . . Clever Nickname would probably remember.
ChatGPT writing scripts. AI generating Perifractic’s voice, image and rendering his studio. Then he can retire and just look after his old car and computers. And Babyfractic, of course… He WILL be the next Max Headroom! Is this Perifractic’s dream, or nightmare…?
I'm the same age as you Peri and 1987 was a special for me, i guess its the year that i look back with most fondness, enjoying my Atari 800XL. Get well mate, from a fellow Retro Londoner. I hope you get some new info on MicroText, interesting story.
It's not bad Ai. it's not quite Perifractic. It might be the script or the way the sentences are put together is done but there are a few things here and there. But as an experiment it's a good show of what is possible And as many people have indicated it is all getting rather good and will continue to improve.
Another great video. Never heard of it. But i used Simons Basic some great commands and think sprite editor. And always did like the BBC model B as used in schools and and great Basic to. Ohh those peeks and poke lol.
Microtext sounds fun, and the mystery is one I would like to see solved, although I had never heard of it before. I've always wondered what happened to Amiga-E as well after its use in Photogenics it should have been taken up by other developers. Good luck on your search Perifractic and was that Jose Fractic I spied handing your shorter self the disk drive package? A very entertaining video as always. Get well soon.
1:46 similarly for me, the 1541 Disk Drive was like wanting a Ferrari. It was never going to happen on our family budget. I never even met anybody who had one.
I was about to suggest that there may be some crossover with the Acornsoft one (until I saw the Bob Watson reference). Simply because the commands you refernce in your old review are VERY BBC like. SOUND especially. I think I have a BBC ROM of this somewhere but haven't used it. I got as far as trying it out years ago sans manual. I think I got as far as working out that commands were prefaced with the dollar sign and not much more than that. I can't offer anything more than this but I hope you get there in the end.
