Watchperson by Mac Oglesby

I first encountered Watchperson at prep school, on the BBC Micro. Recently, I found that in its original form, it was a game for the Commodore PET, published in the book PET Games and Recreations.

Here's the original program, and a couple of ports:

Original program

watchp.vsf (37k) is a snapshot for the VICE emulator. After loading it, you may need to switch to the 'Graphics' keyboard layout (under Settings | Settings | Machine | Model).

ZX81 port

The ZX81 port was created with zmakebas 1.6.1.

wp_zx81.bas (10k) is the listing in text form.

wp_zx81.p (11k) is the game in emulator format.

Spectrum port

The Spectrum port was developed from the ZX81 port rather than the original listing, hence the lack of multiple statements per line and the use of assignment rather than READ / DATA for the village layouts. Again, it was built using zmakebas 1.6.1.

wp_spec.bas (10k) is the listing in text form.

wp_spec.tap (11k) is the tape file for emulators.

PCDOS port

The PCDOS port is written in C. It's aimed at the Sinclair PC200, so uses CGA or MDA graphics.

wp_pc.zip (18k) contains the DOS executable and C source. It will also run on 32-bit versions of Windows; for 64-bit versions, you will need to use a virtualisation or emulation solution such as DOSBox.

John Elliott 2021-11-02