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Software to Show on a 5150

Compgeke

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Sep 30, 2011
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Fairfield, CA, USA
I get to show off a 5150 tomorrow to a class, however the problem I have is what software would be good to demonstrate? Preferably for DOS as the CP/M-86 disk I have is deteriorated beyond readability.

The requirements:
1.) Runs on MDA or VGA
2.) Doesn't need a hard drive.

I already have these programs, and any more I can probably find somewhere and write myself.
pwj.jpg
 
If you are trying to be serious, I'd go with VisiCalc for sure, maybe IBM DisplayWrite, even the BASIC demo disk (music.bas isn't too bad).

If you're being a little less serious - you can actually squeeze Leisure Suit Larry on a 360KB floppy and it will run on a 5150 with MDA and 256KB RAM. There are three 'vol' files - just put the last two on a second disk or not at all.
 
There are a few previous threads about this but the one for games on the 5155 should be pretty useful. I dunno about Leisure Suit Larry, that's sort of an "adult" themed game that may not be appropriate for all ages or audiences.

What brings the occasion to show it off btw? Are you planning on showing it with any specific accessories (mouse, joystick)? A great joystick game that will run and has CGA/EGA graphics is "Fleet Sweep", it's a pretty fun little galactica type game. You can play it with keyboard too but if you have a joystick I think it shows the system off quite well. Otherwise you could show off MS Adventure or something a bit easier like Castle Adventure.. ooh or Sleuth is a fun one too.
 
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I actually have two, one's a 16-64 KB with 64 KB ram at the moment, I can easily throw the AST Six Pack Plus from the XT which has 384 KB on it. It also has the MDA card.

The 2nd one is a 64-256 KB with 256 KB ram and a variation of a Quadboard that has some bad ram on it, I haven't yet done much to it to see where the board has memory issues are at on the board, so it probably has 512 KB or 640 KB total.
 
I actually went ahead and used Adventure, BASIC, DOS 2 and Visicalc as I needed them today and my 486 refused to boot last night to write any new disks. I'm not sure what the BIOS version is, but I do know that it works with VGA and CGA cards so it's not the original release.
 
Cool. Good choices. I'm still curious, what brought up the show and tell for today? What was the reaction?
 
In World History we're going through "Post-war" age, and each day is a new year. Being as the PC still somewhat lives today, it was fairly relevant to the class. One other thing was a teacher though is that we have technology today, but no one ever teaches the history of it.

Reactions were more like "360 KB? You can't even fit a word document on that" "How much did that cost?" "What's it worth today" "Where did you even find that" questions. Some people sure seemed alienated to the idea that you would keep a box of your programs next to you, rather than on a hard drive with a pretty thing to get to it. I did take in the 16-64 KB one, so I did find that lots of the programs I have wouldn't run due to a lack of memory, however most are really made around the XT time, so you would probably have had twice that ram.
 
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