Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

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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Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#1 Post by Strident » Fri Jul 01, 2022 11:04 pm

Mike Snyder...
http://solutionarchive.com/list/author%2C2202/
...known for various IF games in the later 90s and early 2000s...
http://www.sidneymerk.com/

...used to have a website which had all his old TR-80 CoCo games on...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090402002 ... quest.com/

Many of them seem to have been rudimentary text adventures, released through T&D Software: "I wrote dozens of games between 1987 and 1991 which were sold to and distributed by T&D; Subscription Software of Holland, Michigan. I have obtained permission to release my COCO games to the public - so they may live forever."

The games include Hostage, Rodac, the Police Cadet series, Sandstone, Maxomar's World, The Genesis Project, RoboCrook, Treasure Search, Destination Unknown, Silence Syndrome, Flying Saucer Adventure, Country Club Adventure, Shadow World Adventure, and The Entity.

Various adverts for T&D Software disks appear in magazines such as the Rainbow, https://archive.org/details/rainbowmaga ... /page/n83/
Here is a catalogue from 1990... https://archive.org/details/t-and-d-sof ... alog-1990/

We don't seem to currently have any of Mike's CoCo games listed in the database (although we do have a few T&D Software title). Luckily the zip of Mike's disks can be extracted from the Internet Archive, so I will have a proper look through them at some point.

(As an aside... there's a good post about Mike's later IF work here... https://intfiction.org/t/author-highlights-mike-snyder/
* Which points out that Mike was actually the founder of the intfiction forums.

As that article also says, in more recent years Mike did a videogaming podcast with his daughter... http://www.vggpodcast.com/
...and still seem to post to a related Twitter account... https://twitter.com/VGGenerations/ )

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Garry
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#2 Post by Garry » Sat Jul 02, 2022 3:15 am

I have lots of info on CoCo games, as I had done a lot of seaching for these in the past. Most of Mike Snyder's games were published by T&D Subscription Software in Coco-Cassette. This was a cassette-based subscription service. There were 118 cassettes issued from July 1982 to April 1992. Most of these included an adventure.

It looks like I've already done screen grabs and all the CASA notes for the Coco-Cassette games, except for the plot and genre. I'll start uploading them today. I (or someone else) can always update the plot and genre at a later date.

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Strident
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#3 Post by Strident » Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:16 am

Excellent, thanks. I'll gradually work my way through those and add them to the site.

From the advertising, and catalogues, it looks like they expanded the service to disks as well, later on.

We've currently got Zector Adventure down as "T&D Software"
http://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C75 ... nture.html

But checking one of the catalogues, I see that that is the same T&D Subscription Software, as it was on issue 30, so I'll reassign it to the correct publisher...
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/D ... (1-94).pdf
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/D ... TND030.pdf

(As an aside, I notice there's an "adventure generator" on issue 29
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/D ... TND029.pdf
...Mike did mention writing an adventure generator too)

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Garry
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#4 Post by Garry » Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:20 pm

Each issue of Coco-Cassette came with a two-sheet flyer that included one or two paragraphs of chit chat or special offers and a summary of the programs in that issue. It looks like the disk version became available from issue #26, August 1984, where it says, "We are now offering the Coco-Cassette on disk."

I noticed that at least one of the T&D adventures was written with the adventure generator that you mentioned from issue #29. Mike Snyder also did a sort of adventure tutorial in issue #73, July 1988. If you select option 10 in the tutorial, it runs a sample adventure, so I'll include that in the updates.

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Strident
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#5 Post by Strident » Sat Jul 02, 2022 5:08 pm

Lol... what have I done by mentioning these T&D games?! :) I'm gradually working my way through everything you've submitted... thanks Garry! That's a lot of work for both of us... but definitely mostly for you! I can't believe we were missing *that* many games.

Would be very easy to disappear down a T&D rabbit hole too... Tom Dykema sounds like an interesting fellow...
Tom Dykema was in college when he came across the Color Computer. He was only 21 years old when he started his business, T&D Software, in his parents’ basement, selling cassette- and disk-based software on a subscription basis. “I hired a programming genius down the road to help me.” Along with his helper, Dykema wrote software at the rate of about four programs a week for the Somewhere over the Rainbow subscription service.

By the third year, T&D was doing well and advertising in THE RAINBOW but hadn’t yet attended a RAINBOWfest. “Lonnie was always trying to talk me into going to the fests,” Dykema recalls. When he finally did attend, he found people lined up at his booth to buy both his software and blank disks (Figure 4.8). “There were no Best Buy stores at the time, so people came to my booth to get this stuff.”

Dykema’s most memorable RAINBOWfest was in Princeton, New Jersey. “Lonnie would have a party on Saturday night for vendors, with free alcohol.” At the hotel bar where the venue was happening, Dykema spotted Brooke Shields, the world-famous model and star of the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon. In a moment of amazing courage, Dykema gathered up the nerve to ask her to dance. He soon found himself on the dance floor with the statuesque model and movie star.

For years, T&D’s full-page ads were prominently displayed in THE RAINBOW, sometimes taking up four pages in a single issue. When Tom Mix stopped advertising and selling his well-regarded CoCo software as the market softened, T&D made a deal to pick up the remaining stock for $1,000. Dykema immediately began selling the titles, like the Donkey Kong clone, Donkey King, on his own, as Mix transitioned to the PC side of the computer business, eventually retiring in 2007.
Image

Quote and image from... https://armchairarcade.com/perspectives ... -computer/

Alastair
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#6 Post by Alastair » Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:46 pm

Strident wrote:
Sat Jul 02, 2022 5:08 pm
Would be very easy to disappear down a T&D rabbit hole too...
In that case I won't mention T&D Software.zip at https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Disks/Magazines/

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Strident
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#7 Post by Strident » Sat Jul 02, 2022 10:36 pm

Luckily... Garry has already got all that covered...

Now, I'm sure there are Commodore and PC releases that probably need going through. ;)

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Strident
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Re: Mike Snyder's TRS-80 CoCo Adventures

#8 Post by Strident » Sun Jul 03, 2022 3:28 pm

Finally done! :)

Thanks to Garry, we've gone from a handful of Mike's modern games to twenty six titles...
https://solutionarchive.com/list/author%2C2202/

...and the T&D Subscription Software entries have gone from four games to seventy six adventures... all with images!
https://solutionarchive.com/list/company%2C1267/

Lots of new authors logged too.

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