Brian Boese

In the years 1990–92 Brian Boese was a regular contributor of Loadstar Magazine, a disk magazine for the Commodore 64. This is his own account of his contributions:

Fun fact: Almost EVERY program I submitted to LoadStar was 100% text mode, with the help of customized fonts. I can remember offhand what EVERY program I sent them did, except one ("Switch 'Em"). That one I can guess at, but don't remember for sure.

Biorhythm Machine (76: Helpware)

Given your birthdate and the current date, it generated a Biorhythm graph, which you could scroll up and down.

Sliding Blocks (77: Brainware)

There's a set of classic puzzles, with wooden tiles of various shapes and sizes, and you had to slide them around until you rearrange them into a particular pattern. The easiest one, you only had to get the 2×2 square piece to "escape", and the hardest ones were MUCH harder.

Tile Stylist (85: Utilityware)

This was my favourite "hack" on the C=64. If you change the font data so that the "space" character has a pattern, when you clear the screen you get a nifty tile pattern. This program demonstrated the technique, and gave examples of some very nice-looking patterns. If I recall right, it also demonstrated the nice effect of "shadows", where any "window" on the screen appears to be hovering over a 3D space.

Fun fact #2: nearly every program I wrote since this one here included a nifty patterned background.

Solitaires Supreme (87: Brainware)

This was simply a few versions of four of my favourite solitaire card games, including Canfield, Gaps, Bisley, Golf. I seem to recall having had two different programs, with four games each, but am not 100% certain any more.

Faces (89: Zero Page)

Just a text file, showing various smileys.

14-15 Puzzle (89: Brainware)

This was another sliding-tile game. Sam Lloyd created the "14-15" puzzle, and challenged you to rearrange the tiles so that they were all in order. With a strict interpretation of the rules, it's impossible to swap the 14 and 15 into numerical order, but with a "liberal" interpretation ("ignore the position of the space") it IS possible. Solution included.

Stack 'Em (90: Funware)

My columns game, 'nuff said.

Switch 'Em (92: Brainware)

I am not 100% certain what this is any more. I've got a good guess though. It was probably a pair of puzzles, where you had to swap two sets of pegs, so that each was where the other colour started. You can only move one set of pegs to the left (either by one space, or by jumping over another peg), and the other set can only move right:

    xxxx.oooo

The other one was a BIT more complicated:

 
   xxx
   xxx
   xx.oo
     ooo
     ooo
 

One set can only move left or up, the other set can only move right or down.

Seek-A-Sort (96: Utilityware)

This was a fun program for me to write. I was a Computer Science major at Brock University, and wanted to visually demonstrate how various sorting algorithms worked. (This was the ONLY program I wrote that didn't use plain text mode.) Included were demonstrations of Bubble Sort, Shell Sort, Quicksort, and probably a few more.

A set of dots appeared randomly on the screen, and as they were put into order, a diagonal line would slowly appear on the screen.

It also showed a text listing of pseudocode for the algorithms.

All these programs were C64 only, with the exception of Stack 'Em, which he ported to DOS in 1994, under the originally intended title Columns.