Thursday, February 2, 2023

ANALOG Computing (June 1989)

ANALOG Computing was the longest running and most popular Atari 8-bit magazine in the U.S. In 1989 it was getting close to the end of its days. The June 1989 issue includes:

Features

The Adventure Game Showdown - How adding pictures to text adventure style games changed adventure gaming.

Secret Agent: Mission 1 - A type-in text adventure game with a secret agent theme.

Sector to Printer - A type-in program that creates map print outs of adventure games by extracting map related data stored on disk. This is a demo program tailored for Ultima III.

Disk Directory Alphabetizer - A type-in program that will reorganize your disk directories to be in alphabetical order.

_{Table of Contents from the June 1989 issue of ANALOG Computing}

Reviews

Mario Bros. - Mario Bros. was a 1983 arcade game so this was a pretty late conversion fort he Atari 8-bit. But if there was one thing Atari was good at, it was releasing and re-releasing old games.

Desert Falcon - This Zaxxon-like game was one of the last major Atari releases for 8-bit computers. It was really an Atari XEGS game but would also work on the XL and XE computers.

_{Table of Contents from the June 1989 issue of ANALOG Computing (continued)}

Columns

Database DELPHI - An introduction to the DELPHI online service, the Atari SIG (Special Interest Group) in particular.

Boot Camp - A look at the 6502 instruction set and how it addresses memory.

The End User - Info about user groups and a look at SpartDOS X.

Departments

Editorial - A sort of intro to the "Adventure Game Showdown" article above. There seems to be a concern that adding graphics to text adventures was a bad thing. Ironically, text adventures (with or without graphics) were already pretty much a dead genre by this time.

Reader Comment - Letters from readers about reviews, previous type-in programs, internal troubles at Atari and the Atari 850 interface.

_{Back cover of the June 1989 issue of ANALOG Computing}

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