Temple of the Snow Dragon

[+dhe]

Reading through back issues of NIAD, Temple of the Snow Dragon was hailed as the block buster of all adventure games.

 

There was a quick interview with the author, where Temple of, was to be the first in a trilogy.

 

Moby games has a good write up here:

   https://www.mobygames.com/game/166447/temple-of-the-snow-dragon/

 

Here is a cover, where you can see it as a trilogy:

   

 

Unfortunately over a period of time, it was mentioned in NIAD, there was a delay in the next game because of the incredible demand, a delay for bug fixes, etc, etc....

 

Then the sequel was never mentioned again. {saddly}

 

Does anyone know the back story on what happen to that caused the developers to never release another adventure in this series?

[NIAD]

Sol Swift was the programmer and his demise is well known and discussed in numerous newsletters of the time.

 

Tony Patterson was the graphics artist/game designer and IIRC he had everything ready… but no programmer.

[Tempest]

1 hour ago, NIAD said:

Sol Swift was the programmer and his demise is well known and discussed in numerous newsletters of the time.

Oh so the programmer passed away before the next game could be released?

[+dhe]

Thanks @NIAD

 

  That makes sense, I read the interview you guys did with Tony, and he seemed very engaged in doing a full Trilogy, even starting work on number 2. I didn't see that Sol was involved.   The implosion of Sol and GODOS matches the timeline perfectly.

 

   There was a guy in the TI-99 world who was doing some really great programming late in the TI-99/4a life cycle, I think the pressure just became to much for him. One day he is there like a rock star, and the next he totally disappeared.

 

   I think the same thing might have happened to Sol in one way or another.

 

[adamcon]

44 minutes ago, dhe said:

Thanks @NIAD

 

  That makes sense, I read the interview you guys did with Tony, and he seemed very engaged in doing a full Trilogy, even starting work on number 2. I didn't see that Sol was involved.   The implosion of Sol and GODOS matches the timeline perfectly.

 

   There was a guy in the TI-99 world who was doing some really great programming late in the TI-99/4a life cycle, I think the pressure just became to much for him. One day he is there like a rock star, and the next he totally disappeared.

 

   I think the same thing might have happened to Sol in one way or another.

 

That's more like it, Sol disappeared again, not died; just did the disappearing act.  Shame, because despite all his faults, he did some great programs fo rthe ADAM.

[rietveld]

Its Probably difficult to program on the Adam from the wrong side of a prison cell 

[Tempest]

Ok now I'm really curious.  What exactly did he do?

[else]

Found this.  Apparently he went to jail for taking ~$5000 from Adam enthusiasts for a product he didn't deliver.  Seems pretty overblown if you ask me.  Did he really go to JAIL for this (apparently there was even a TRIAL!)?  This kind of thing happens all the time now days -- we just accept it and move on for the most part....

 

Quote

From: drushel@junior.wariat.org (Richard F. Drushel)

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.misc

Subject: Some ADAM history, post-Coleco (was Re: History of dead PCs)

Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.misc

Date: 1 Aug 1995 02:44:58 GMT

To amplify a little on my remarks at ADAMcon…

Solomon Swift and the ADAM.

The “Solomon Swift debacle” was the story of a swindle which didn’t start out as a swindle. Around 1986, a man calling himself Dr. Solomon Swift (not his real name, not really a Dr. either) began publishing a good, highly technical and assembler- oriented newsletter called “Nibbles and Bits”. It was full of neat assembler routines you could POKE into memory from SmartBASIC, to access OS routines, manipulate sprite graphics, format and edit disks, etc. Some came from disassembly of Coleco programs like SmartBASIC and SmartLOGO, others came from hardware manufacturers who gave him their latest add-ons to play with. From time to time, Sol, through his company, Digital Express, would release integrated, commercial versions of the hack utility programs he published in his newsletter. Some of these, especially the graphics program PowerPaint, stand among the best ADAM software ever written (for the end user; on the inside, Sol’s programs were all cruft and spaghetti–he was totally self-taught and dyslexic as well; nothing had a true source code, it was all block edits in hex or POKEd in from SmartBASIC).

 

In about 1988, Sol announced that he was developing a new operating system for the ADAM, called GoDOS. GoDOS would be a graphical interface, mouse/joystick driven, with icons, pull-down menus, dialogue boxes, MacOS for the ADAM, as it were. He also planned to develop new applications to work under GoDOS, replacing the original Coleco software–GoBASIC (an enhanced BASIC interpreter), GoFiler (a database program), GoWriter (a word processor), GoLink (a telecom program), and I believe GoPaint (a graphics program). Soon after this announcement in all the leading ADAM newsletters, publication of “Nibbles and Bits” began to get erratic. Sol finally said that he was in a temporary financial squeeze, but that work was proceeding on GoDOS; GoBASIC was almost completed. He asked for, and received, substantial prepayments from many ADAMites for the entire Go software series, as seed money to keep the project afloat. In 1990, he did release a password-protected, time- bomb version of GoDOS with GoBASIC to everyone who had prepaid (after a certain number of boots, even with the correct password, it self-destructed); but then he disappeared, and there were no more issues of “Nibbles and Bits”. He took with him (I believe) over $5000 in prepayments.

 

The ADAM community was completely shocked, because Sol had been an important source of good software and useful technical information. After much legal wrangling on the part of some who had been left holding the bad, Sol was finally tracked down, tried, convicted, and sent off to prison. He’s still there today. In an attempt to make restitution, he left the rights to his other commercial software in trusted hands, with the direction that all profits go towards paying back his creditors. GoDOS with GoBASIC were released into the public domain. Out of curiosity, I’ve disassembled some of GoBASIC, and it’s a prime example of creeping featurism run amok. You can do *everything*–music, graphics, menus, dialogue boxes, you name it–but there are so many features, there is no workspace left to do *anything*. It fills an entire 64K memory expander and all but 8K of standard RAM; the most you can do is show that individual commands work, but you run out of memory before you can build anything other than a toy program. And all the new command names are 15 characters long (Sol had evidently been reading some MacOS documentation), wasting even more memory. The other projected Go software evidently never existed–Sol’s hope had been to write them in the GoBASIC…

 

The scam soured lots of ADAMites; they left, betrayed, and have never come back. Those who remained became very skeptical of new software or hardware claims–something I ran into when I appeared on the scene in 1992 claiming to have disassembled and commented the EOS operating system and to have written a new, improved SmartBASIC interpreter. I actually had to get “name” people in the ADAM community to vouch that I was not Sol Swift in another guise; there is good evidence that before “Solomon Swift” appeared, the same man was “The Data Doctor”, another early source of ADAM software and technical information, whose telephone stopped being answered one day…

 

 

Edited December 21, 2023 by else

[Tempest]

36 minutes ago, else said:

Found this.  Apparently he went to jail for taking ~$5000 from Adam enthusiasts for a product he didn't deliver.  Seems pretty overblown if you ask me.  Did he really go to JAIL for this (apparently there was even a TRIAL!)?  This kind of thing happens all the time now days -- we just accept it and move on for the most part....

Thanks for the information.  Sounds like he got in over his head and decided to take the money and run rather than come clean with everyone.  I'm not surprised that he served some jail time, but if this happened in 88 and he was still in jail as of the writing of that article (95) I'm amazed he got that long of a sentence for stealing $5,000.  Usually those 10+ year terms for fraud are reserved for stealing much more than that.  I wonder if there was something else going on that got him a longer sentence?  I'm also amazed he was able to raise $5,000 or more for something like that at the time.

 

As neat as a Mac-like GUI for the ADAM would have been, how many people would have bought something like that in 1988?  I know there were still a small group of ADAM diehards around that time, but enough to support something like this?  Sounds like he was trying to recreate GEOS on the ADAM with all those add-on packages.

[else]

Yea.  I'm not even sure if he took the money and ran.  Sounds like he put quite a bit of time and effort into it and that it was pretty far along.  Assuming he was doing it full time and living off the $5000, it seems like he simply ran out of money before it was finished.  I agree, there must be more to the story than what it appears.  Maybe someone else with more knowledge can fill in the pieces?

[zzip]

1 hour ago, else said:

Found this.  Apparently he went to jail for taking ~$5000 from Adam enthusiasts for a product he didn't deliver.  Seems pretty overblown if you ask me.  Did he really go to JAIL for this (apparently there was even a TRIAL!)?  This kind of thing happens all the time now days -- we just accept it and move on for the most part....

 

So he invented Crowdfunding?  

[Tempest]

17 minutes ago, else said:

Yea.  I'm not even sure if he took the money and ran.  Sounds like he put quite a bit of time and effort into it and that it was pretty far along.  Assuming he was doing it full time and living off the $5000, it seems like he simply ran out of money before it was finished.  I agree, there must be more to the story than what it appears.  Maybe someone else with more knowledge can fill in the pieces?

Well if he didnt take money and run and just plain ran out of money before finishing the product then I'm not sure that's illegal, especially if no contracts were involved.  That happened all the time back in the day.  Like you say, there must be more to this story.

[rietveld]

GoDOS v1.2 Demo - Disk #01 (1990) (Phoenix 2000).dsk GoDOS v1.2 Demo - Disk #02 (1990) (Phoenix 2000).dsk

[rietveld]

[else]

Oh, I see.  A yellow desktop with a blue boarder?  Inexcusable!  Throw him in the slammer....

 

😀

[Tempest]

That is impressive looking.  Shame it never finished, but I don't think 256k memory expanders were a thing back then and even they did it would have been way too expensive for most to afford.

[rietveld]

Its actually pretty nice when I use my Adam mouse

[NIAD]

12 hours ago, Tempest said:

That is impressive looking.  Shame it never finished, but I don't think 256k memory expanders were a thing back then and even they did it would have been way too expensive for most to afford.

There was a lot more to these events and more than likely what really happened to Solomon Swift or should I say P.R. Dick or other aliases that he used over the years.

 

While no one has the exact dollar amount, Sol took pre-orders for GoDOS and the numerous Go series of programs that far exceeded $5000.

 

As far as circa 1988/89 this was a time period that was the end of the height of the ADAM User Group/Mail Order/3rd Party development days… I know all too well as I was the one mailing out nearly 2000 newsletters as well as preparing and shipping orders. While there were still some very good years left, by 1993 things had really slowed to a crawl as many had moved onto newer systems, especially affordable PC clones.

 

There were numerous sized Memory Expanders up to 512K available in this period of time, but the largest MEs were more popular with people that used CP/M or T-DOS until more advanced EOS programs like PowerPaint and advanced ramdisk utilities were released.

 

Through it all, he made vast contributions to the ADAM scene that were very much appreciated and keep the system a viable option for many for far more years than most could ever have imagined considering how quickly the ADAM was orphaned by Coleco and the rest of the industry. This is pretty much why so many in the community gave him so much leeway when things started to go south circa 1989/90.

[else]

Ok. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what all went on. Reading it today though it kinda sounds like a failed (or late?) Kickstarter project. If it was, kinda unfortunate he did many years of hard time for it, apparently. Seems like it was a really ambitious project — maybe too ambitious. But again, I wasn’t there….

[NIAD]

2 hours ago, else said:

Ok. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what all went on. Reading it today though it kinda sounds like a failed (or late?) Kickstarter project. If it was, kinda unfortunate he did many years of hard time for it, apparently. Seems like it was a really ambitious project — maybe too ambitious. But again, I wasn’t there….

The GoDOS demo version that was made was just a ton of spaghetti code piled on top of SmartBasic 1.0.

 

It wasn't similar to a Kickstarter, he took preorders for it and a number of other Go software titles (GoWrite, GoCalc, etc.) that were never going to be completed and as I mentioned, there was more to his legal problems than just unfulfilled software orders.

 

[Tempest]

5 minutes ago, NIAD said:

The GoDOS demo version that was made was just a ton of spaghetti code piled on top of SmartBasic 1.0

 

Oh so the demo isn't anything that's really usable then?  Nothing that could be built off of?

[rietveld]

9 hours ago, Tempest said:

Oh so the demo isn't anything that's really usable then?  Nothing that could be built off of?

There are some copies of the working GoDOS floating around.  I do not think they were released into the PD so I opted NOT to post any . Dsk images here.  

Again its a decent looking Adam GUI and works well with my Adam tank mouse

[Tempest]

1 hour ago, rietveld said:

There are some copies of the working GoDOS floating around.  I do not think they were released into the PD so I opted NOT to post any . Dsk images here.  

Again its a decent looking Adam GUI and works well with my Adam tank mouse

If this guy screwed everyone over and took their money and ran I would have thought the working program would have been put into PD by force (so to speak).

 

 Very very interesting.  Thanks for all the info on this.  

[NIAD]

11 hours ago, Tempest said:

Oh so the demo isn't anything that's really usable then?  Nothing that could be built off of?

It’s useable and you can try it out with an emulator or on an ADAM. There are demo programs included and another collection of programs that were made to test it’s capabilities.

 

IIRC the free workspace that is available to create GoBasic programs was around 7K, so one had to write very tight code or chain programs together to work around the free space limitation of GoBasic… ie: SmartBasic when loaded has 25K if free space available.

 

To be clear, the demo is not really a new OS, rather it is a vastly expanded SmartBasic programming language. The included text documentation and demo programs detail things well enough to use as well as articles in newsletter PDFs that are available.

Edited December 24, 2023 by NIAD

[NIAD]

The disk image files are available on the ADAM Archive and other sites to download.

Edited December 24, 2023 by NIAD