About
This is the earliest known build of Hangman, one of the games Tatung wrote in house for the Einstein and shipped on the TC01 System Master disc. It is version V008, dated 13 June 1984, by David Wess, and it predates every copy in our archive: the TC01 System Master Disc we hold carries the later V009, dated 28 January 1985.
It did not come from a System Master at all. It was recovered as a deleted file from a second-hand, non-commercial disc - a copy of the commercial adventure Cursed Chambers that someone had first used to hold the System Master games, then wiped and reused. Deleting a file on the Einstein only flips a single byte in the directory, so the program's data survived intact until the space was reused. We pulled it back, byte for byte, with the new einstein_dsk_recover in Einstein Disc Tools.
Every game on that disc is dated to a tight window in mid-June 1984 - earlier than the builds on any master we hold - so these versions may well have shipped on an earlier System Master, possibly the v1.0 we are still trying to find. If you have an early Einstein system disc, we would love to hear from you.
The download is a standard Einstein .dsk holding HANGMAN.XBS. It is an Xtal BASIC program, not a bootable disc: boot a System Master (or any XtalDOS disc with Xtal BASIC), mount this disc as drive 1, then LOAD "1:HANGMAN" and RUN. The game's word lists lived in separate DICTIONH.DAT and DICTIONE.DAT files on the System Master.
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