What Do You Use Your Adam For?

[clindholm]

Back when I was in high school, I found my Adam in a thrift store. I used it alot for reports and essays.

Now, I'm 49 and still have it. I have always been curious as to whether the Adam (or any 8bit machine) was actually used as a productivity tool way back when. I have always wanted to spend a month or so using my Adam exclusively in my day to day use (other than work of course).

How did you.... Or do you use your Adam? Games only? Programming for a reason? Programming for the hell of it? Or are you a full time Admite!?

[Wmaalouli]

Never had an Adam until 3 years ago or so. I kind of developed a soft spot for it though, and have been programming on it in both assembly and Turbo Pascal under CP/M.

[clindholm]

Cool! I've seen your Ace of Aces. Very impressive stuff. I never thought CP/M could do graphics. You ever thought about doing some sort of "Under a killing Moon" type game on the Adam?

[Wmaalouli]

Interactive fiction with still images is totally doable, but animation is very slow unless everything is loaded into memory first or we have a fast storage device like a cart to store the data. Look at what was done on the TI 99/4A with Dragon's Lair as an example here: https://youtu.be/dYcl0ozAjiE

[clindholm]

WOW!

That was amazing! I had no idea a ti99 could even REMOTELY do something like that!

[Wmaalouli]

The cart contains a microcontroller doing all the heavy lifting and high speed streaming of the video data with the TI just dumping it onto the video processor for display and managing player input. Could not have been possible otherwise. Still impressive nonetheless.

[joltguy]

I really use my ADAM for fun. Not just games though... I love exploring all the old ADAM software!

Back in the late 80s when I got my ADAM (the one I still use today) I mainly used SmartBASIC and (once I got a modem) ADAMLink for some good old 300-baud BBSing. Of course I also used SmartWriter to type up all my school reports too!

Nowadays I still spend the majority of my ADAM time hacking around in BASIC but I also love playing with CP/M and SmartLOGO. If I'm short on time or just want to have some fun I'll fire up a game and play for a bit. No shortage of awesome games for ADAM!