Atari 400/800 - 8 player Christmas Quiz

Fletch · December 11, 2015

My wife and I hosted a few friends for a dinner / game night last weekend. Normally after dinner we all play a board or card game of some kind and chat. We all take turns hosting every couple of months or so, and this was our turn.

Being that we were hosting in December, my wife thought it might be interesting to have a holiday quiz game of some kind and asked our son to create something. He seemed less than interested, so I offered to make one on my Atari. She seemed dubious, but since she had exhausted her options I got the nod.

She had complied a large list of questions from a place she had worked many years back, so I chose a random subset of said questions and went about trying to make it a game of some sort.

There are ten of us that get together for these events, four married couples and two teenage boys (one is my son and the other a son of another attending couple). Since my wife had complied the questions and I wrote the program, she and I were obviously disqualified from playing.

Leaving eight eligible players, I immediately thought of using paddle controllers as a method of buzzing in to answer. I put a question on the screen and whomever pressed their button would gain control and then pick from four possible choices.

To choose, the player turns the paddle's dial until the answer turns yellow. Hit the button and find out if it is right or wrong . My wife thought it would be good to have four teams, so each set of two paddles are on the same team. I thought it would be better to have eight individual players, but making the wife happy is always a good thing so I went with her team idea.

Anyhow the game seemed to work ok, but i assumed people would understand to just tap the button to buzz in. A few players kept holding the button down and that advanced straight through to selecting an answer without really choosing. Not their fault, I just didn't think about it being an issue when I programmed it.

So if you play it, keep that in mind as it happened quite a few times.

Oh, and I cannot say whether or not all of the questions and answers are correct. I just copied things from a sheet of paper my wife handed me and I did zero fact checking.

To load, boot with BASIC. At the ready prompt, enter LOAD "D:XMAS.BAS" then type RUN. Team one is paddle 0,1. Team 2 paddle 2,3, etc.

If anyone wants to improve on the game I am all for it. Not being a programmer, I am sure I probably did things in some odd ways. I will not be offended at all if you point those things out. I cannot learn if I don't know how I could have done things better.

Hope you enjoy it.

-Pete

xmas.atr.zip