Twenty-two years ago I wrote a bunch of games for Windows 3.1; games that you might have found at Electronics Boutique or KMart. The games did pretty well but times change. Compared to today’s games, they are primitive. For example, here is a picture of my game, Bird Cage, which was one of three games in my Dice Games package.
The program is fairly simple. Place your bets, and then roll the dice. If you bet on a particular number, the payoff depends on how many of that number there are in the results. You can also bet based on the total of the dice or you can bet that there will be a triple, or three of the same number.
Players and their bankrolls are automatically saved from session to session, and the bank roll carries over to the Over ‘n Under game that was included in the same package. I am slightly embarrassed to tell you that I created all of the graphics myself using Paint. Lines on the betting table were sometimes created pixel by pixel. At the time I created them, the graphics seemed pretty good looking to me. Amazing how times have changed, right?
My source code was lost years ago. The original games were written using Visual Basic 3 and stored in the proprietary format that the compile created. I wish I had exported the code to plain text, but that’s all water under the bridge.
Of course, the original programs won’t run on Windows 10. In fact, they haven’t been able to run since Vista (or maybe even XP) so in order to create the screenshot above, I had to create a virtual machine running Windows 2000. Based on that and the information in the help file, I have started playing with a new version.
My games included:
Here is a picture of the new user interface I created for Bird Cage
Should I recreate all of my games? Would anybody care?
Seriously, have games gone beyond the capability of a single developer? Do I need to get together a team or should I forget the idea altogether? I really would like to hear your comments.
Who is Irene P. Smith? I am an author, programmer, and web designer. A former Contributing Editor to PC Techniques Magazine, I have written about computers and programming since 1989, and began publishing fiction in 2003. My home is in New York State, along the Delaware River, where I live with my husband and son.
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