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Some artists we only have an excuse to discuss once a year, in the wake of their making an annual appearance, like Punxsutawney Phil, in an artpack… then retreating back into obscurity. Others have a stable of projects they grind away on over the year, churning out projects and milestones on a regular basis like miniature computer art factories.
So, here we have VileR, who has featured in these pages before. Being a connoisseur of vintage technology, he recognized that a very significant milestone was coming up on the calendar – the 35th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC, the contender that elevated home computing beyond the hobbyist miasma of the late ‘70s when the market was caught in three-way gridlock between the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and Tandy’s TRS-80.
Something important was folded in to the release of the IBC PC. In PC-DOS, one of its three options of included operating systems (supposing you eschewed CPM-86 or UCSD D-PASCAL), it included a BASIC language interpreter with some sample programs. There was a company specialising in home implementations of BASIC in those days: Microsoft. One of the sample programs included was a little driving game called DONKEY.BAS, written by a nobody named William Gates III. It could be characterised as … crude but effective. It boasted functional graphics, but let’s be fair here: what it really needed were textmode graphics. (I’m not sure that its graphics aren’t simply remapped text characters, but let’s not split hairs here.)(VileR responds: “I can say that Donkey’s original graphics aren’t remapped text chars after all… but that *does* touch on another idea I had…”)
VileR saw what needed to be done to mark this occasion: clone the historic (yet largely unknown) game, in the textmode it always so richly deserved, as a PC Booter (the delivery mechanism of nearly all original PC games), re-implemented in 512 bytes. And here you have it. All in a day’s work! Hats off to VileR and his Sorry Ass!
