David S found the BASIC COMPUTER GAMES Vol 1 (TRS-80 Edition) for sale and kindly drop shipped it straight to me. Since Dave Ahl had previously released all his work (and all Creative Computing work), you can download it by clicking below!
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Title: Basic Computer Games Volume I TRS-80 EditionPublisher: David Ahl – Creative Computing
Year: 1979
Size: 36,612,228
Pages: 194
OCRed: Yes
Downloaded this a few times, came up with a blank PDF each time. Maybe it’s just me? I’m on a (current) Mac.
It’s not blank. It just takes a lot of processing to display. Not sure why that would be.
Please let me answer that … It is because this site’s purpose is to archive. While some people like to post bitmap super compressed versions of things and call it a day, I am trying for something better. So I scan at full 600DPI, full color, non-compressed TIF, and I have my PDF import set to no compression. This way, if you ever need to extract the pages, you can. If there is ever any better OCR than there is today, you can re-run it through. Individual users are free to compress the heck out of whatever they want, but since these scans may be the only existing scans to ever be, I don’t buy into the “scan it as it is and post it — yellowed crooked pages and all” kind of thing.
Makes sense!
For Jack, if you want a version more suitable for casual reading, it’s easy on your Mac. Open the archival PDF in Preview, and choose “Export…” from the “File” menu.
From the “Quartz Filter” dropdown menu, choose “Reduce File Size”. Make sure “Optimize images for screen” and “Save images as JPEG” are checked. Then “Save”. This will create a file that displays much more quickly.
It’s great to have the scan as there’s an “bad” version floating around (TRS-80 cover, but plain 101 computer games content)
I found a few problems with the scan–some rotated or perhaps missing pages:
Page 11: Rotated (output of Banner)
Page 37: Missing (Buzzword)
Page 38: Missing (Buzzword)
Page 60: “Even Wins” is cut off, Flip Flop on top of it.
Page 61: Seems to be missing (part of Even Wins?)
Page 124: rotated (One Check)
Page 132,133: page number cut off, code is probably OK
Page 134: Upside down (cartoon after Poker)