A conversation I had online moved towards the topic of my first game, which many people believe is Maelstrom. Not so -- actually, while I was a freshman at the Rochester Institute of Technology (studying Photojournalism), I authored a little-known game called "Wacky Wheel". Let's just say that it is little-known for a reason.
Written in 1990 on a state-of-the-art Mac Portable computer with 12mb of RAM, a black and white screen, and a battery the size of a brick that made carrying it around no easy task. My college buddies and I collaborated on it, and had quite a bit of fun inventing the phrases/prizes. Alas, our dreams of getting rich via Whacky Wheel's wild success were dashed... but I digress.
After a little Google search, I was surprised to find Wacky Wheel was still available for download. With a little hesitation, I downloaded Wacky Wheel, and was surprised to find that it still runs under Mac OS X 10.2.3. That's pretty impressive, given that it was written in Pascal as a 68K binary -- this was before color was widespread on the Mac, and certainly before Apple adopted the PowerPC.
Not only that, but I was pleased to see that although Wacky Wheel is quite primitive, it is still pretty decently done for what it is. It is basically a computer clone of "Wheel of Fortune", complete with lots of phrases, prizes, different characters to pick, etc. It also remembers stats for each player across games, and you can customize everything in it (phrases, prizes, etc.). If you want to check it out, grab it here:
ftp://ftp.AmbrosiaSW.com/pub/freebies/wackywheel.sit
(but please, ignore the shareware notices/registration on it -- I don't even know who lives at that address now
).
Andrew Welch
Ambrosia Software, Inc.
12/14/2002
http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/
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