M.U.L.E. is a 1983 multiplayer video game written for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers by Ozark Softscape. Designer Danielle Bunten Berry took advantage of the four joystick ports of the Atari 400 and 800 to allow four-player simultaneous play. M.U.L.E. was one of the first five games published in 1983 by new company Electronic Arts, alongside Axis Assassin, Archon: The Light and the Dark, Worms?, and Hard Hat Mack. Primarily a turn-based strategy game, it incorporates real-time elements where players compete directly as well as aspects that simulate economics.
The IBM PCjr was a home computer produced and marketed by IBM from March 1984 to May 1985, intended as a lower-cost variant of the IBM PC with hardware capabilities better suited for video games, in order to compete more directly with other home computers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64.
The Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) is a game engine developed by Sierra On-Line. The company originally developed the engine for King's Quest (1984), an adventure game which Sierra and IBM wished to market in order to attract consumers to IBM's lower-cost home computer, the IBM PCjr.
1984 saw many sequels and prequels along with new titles such as 1942, Boulder Dash, Cobra Command, Jet Set Willy, Karate Champ, Kung-Fu Master, Tetris, Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Punch-Out!! The year's highest-grossing arcade games were Pole Position in the United States, for the second year in a row, and Track & Field in the United Kingdom. The year's best-selling home system was Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom), which was only sold in Japan at the time.
Rocky's Boots is an educational logic puzzle game by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm, published by The Learning Company in 1982. It was released for the Apple II, CoCo, Commodore 64, IBM PC and the IBM PCjr. It was followed by a more difficult sequel, Robot Odyssey. It won Software of the Year awards from Learning Magazine (1983), Parent's Choice magazine (1983), and Infoworld, and received the Gold Award from the Software Publishers Association. It was one of the first educational software products for personal computers to successfully use an interactive graphical simulation as a learning environment.
Will Harvey's Music Construction Set (MCS) is a music composition notation program designed by Will Harvey for the Apple II and published by Electronic Arts in 1983. Harvey wrote the original Apple II version in assembly language when he was 15 and in high school. MCS was conceived as a tool to add music to his previously published game, an abstract shooter called Lancaster for the Apple II.
King's Quest is an adventure game developed by Sierra On-Line and published originally for the IBM PCjr in 1984 and later for several other systems between 1984 and 1989. The game was originally titled King's Quest; the subtitle Quest for the Crown was added to the game box in the 1987 re-release, but did not appear in the game.
Tynesoft Computer Software was a software developer and publisher in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Sirius Software was a video game publisher of Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, and VIC-20 games in the early 1980s. Sirius also developed games for the Atari 2600 which were published by 20th Century Fox Video Games.
Atarisoft was a brand name used by Atari, Inc. in 1983 and 1984 to publish video games for non-Atari home computers and consoles. Each platform had a specific color for its game packages: video games sold for the Commodore 64 were in green boxes, games for the TI-99/4A in yellow, the IBM PC in blue, and so on.
Bank Street Writer is a word processor for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, MSX, Macintosh, IBM PC, and IBM PCjr computers. It was designed in 1981 by a team of educators at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, software developer Franklin E. Smith, and programmers at Intentional Educations in Watertown, Massachusetts. The software was sold in two versions: one for elementary school students published by Scholastic and a general version from Broderbund.
In computer architecture, shared graphics memory refers to a design where the graphics chip does not have its own dedicated memory, and instead shares the main system RAM with the CPU and other components.
Crossfire is a multidirectional shooter created by Jay Sullivan for the Apple II and published by On-Line Systems in 1981. It was ported to the Atari 8-bit family, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and IBM PC. The Atari 8-bit release had a separate cartridge and magnetic media release; the cartridge version ran on a 16k machine and used character mode graphics while the magnetic media version largely duplicated the graphics from the Apple II and ran in hi-res bitmap mode, needing 32k of memory to run. The C64 release had background music which is absent from other versions. A cartridge version of Crossfire was a 1984 launch title for the IBM PCjr, announced in late 1983.
Oil's Well is a video game published by Sierra On-Line in 1983. The game was written for the Atari 8-bit family by Thomas J. Mitchell. Oil's Well is similar to the 1982 arcade game Anteater, re-themed to be about drilling for oil instead of a hungry insectivore. Ports were released in 1983 for the Apple II and Commodore 64, in 1984 for ColecoVision and the IBM PC, then in 1985 for MSX and the Sharp X1. A version with improved visuals and without Mitchell's involvement was released for MS-DOS in 1990.
Bank Street Music Writer is an application for composing and playing music for the Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Commodore 64 and IBM PC. It was written by Glen Clancy and published by Mindscape. The original Atari version, developed under the name "Note Processor," was released in 1985 and uses the computer's on-board sound chip to produce four-voice music recordings. The Commodore 64 version also uses that system's sound hardware, while the Apple and IBM PC versions require a sound card which was included in the retail box, or alternately use the three-voice sound chip standard with all Tandy and IBM PCjr computers.
A ROM cartridge, usually referred to in context simply as a cartridge, cart, or card, is a replaceable part designed to be connected to a consumer electronics device such as a home computer, video game console or, to a lesser extent, electronic musical instruments.
Wizard and the Princess is a graphic adventure game written for the Apple II and published in 1980 by On-Line Systems. It was the second title released in the Hi-Res Adventures series after Mystery House. While Mystery House used monochrome drawings, Wizard and the Princess added color. Ports for the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64 were released in 1982 and 1984 respectively. The 1982 self-booting version for IBM PC compatibles was renamed Adventure in Serenia.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific or engineering-oriented computers of the time such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were playing video games, but they were also regularly used for word processing and programming.
Tandy Graphics Adapter is a computer display standard for the Tandy 1000 series of IBM PC compatibles, which has compatibility with the video subsystem of the IBM PCjr but became a standard in its own right.
