module
36
The course's history, most recent first. Dates are when the change was made, not when it was published.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-23 | First published. |
| 2026-09-23 | Breakout: the ball and every rub-out are drawn in the colour of the row they are on (row_colour), after the play-test showed bricks beside the ball turning white (S33). |
| 2026-09-23 | Breakout: the play area is columns 2-37, one column inside each wall, and the ball, brick and wall shapes are drawn in the six pixels a 40-column character shows (S25, S28, S30, S33). The play-test showed the wall turning white where the ball touched it and the ball's right edge missing: the 40-column screen's characters are six pixels wide and the video chip's colour cells eight, so neighbours share a cell. |
| 2026-09-23 | First complete draft: S1-S35 and Appendices I-IV, for HiSoft-C Compiler V1.35 on the Tatung Einstein under XtalDOS 1.31, with ED80 as the editor. Every listing, every Change One Thing edit and every exercise solution compiled and run in MAME 0.289 before being written up. |
| 2026-09-23 | The game is Breakout, built in seven stages (S27-S33); BREAKOUT.C and BREAKOUT.COM are on the course disc, the stages BREAK1.C-BREAK7.C are printed in full in Appendix III. |
| 2026-09-23 | Every listing puts #include STDIO.H first and the library lines last in the form #include ?EIN.LIB? then #include ?STDIO.LIB? (or ?CPM.LIB? then ?STDIO.LIB?), which compiles only the library functions a program uses: a small program's .COM is 6K instead of 10K and the compile ten seconds shorter (S6, S8). An earlier draft put #include STDIO.LIB at the top. |
| 2026-09-23 | The course disc rebuilt as hisoftc.mfi with the finished game added: eleven files, 72K free (S3). |
| 2026-09-23 | The course switched from C/80 (The Software Toolworks, 1983) to HiSoft C, the compiler sold for the Einstein, when a copy came to light; the C/80 drafts are withdrawn. |
| 2026-09-16 | Project begun. |
Corrections to a published course will be listed here with the section they affect.
