The Black Hole (Softside)

Games for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, Apple ][ and the rest of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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Strident
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Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 2:57 pm

The Black Hole (Softside)

#1 Post by Strident » Sat Sep 11, 2021 3:33 pm

Jason Dyer has covered The Black Hole (adventure) by Softside recently on his excellent All the Adventures blog.
https://bluerenga.blog/2021/09/10/black ... ture-1981/

We currently have it listed as a Peter Kirsch game...
http://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C16 ... C+The.html

...an attribution that Jason disputes, which may be a correct challenge as I'm not seeing many references regarding the author of the game online.

I presume our author reference comes from an import from that Atari archive data, e.g.
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-40 ... e_649.html
It's not clear where their information was derived from, in the case of Black Hole.

We currently have 23 titles logged under Peter Kirsch.
http://solutionarchive.com/list/author%2C276/

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Garry
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Re: The Black Hole (Softside)

#2 Post by Garry » Sat Sep 11, 2021 4:31 pm

I was a subscriber to the SoftSide Adventure of the Month series for the Atari 8-bit computer. I now have the games for the Atari, Apple II and TRS-80. I was about to jump in and defend the authorship, as I may well have made the entry. Peter Kirsch has an inimitable programming style, so I immediately checked the listings, and The Black Hole is not written in that style!

I can't see any author credits in any of the listings and the early games didn't have any author credits in the magazine. (You must remember that the early games were written by one author and ported to the other systems by the SoftSide staff, typically Alan J Zett, whereas the later games were mostly written by Peter Kirsch for all three systems.)

So, if it wasn't written by Peter Kirsch, then who the hell wrote it?

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Strident
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Re: The Black Hole (Softside)

#3 Post by Strident » Sat Sep 11, 2021 5:30 pm

Garry wrote:
Sat Sep 11, 2021 4:31 pm
So, if it wasn't written by Peter Kirsch, then who the hell wrote it?
Yeah, that's the million dollar question, I guess.

I suppose the next step would be to see if the listing structure bares any resemblance to one of the other authors style? Probably won't help much if it is the case that whoever wrote it based it on the Dog Star framework.

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