Scargill

Electronics Devices and software

As a youngster I wrote countless articles for the electronics press in the 1970s, mostly for fun. Magazine names such as Practical Electronics, Radio Constructor, Practical Wireless and Elector come to mind. The article on the left used light-sensing and averaging technology and a solid-state switch to offer completely automatic car lighting LONG before this became standard on high-end cars.  I recall one design for an alarm system saw me contacted by a local flying instructor who wanted to get into that industry and so in exchange for designing simple products for him, he taught me how to fly, developing a lasting friendly relationship in the process – which was nice!

ADVEN-80 – A system for creating Adventure Games on the PC

I was originally exposed to the original Crowther adventure on the mainframes of Newcastle University during my time with Newcastle’s first computer "club" in which I was the secretary and wrote the monthly newsletter. I remember programming the first UK-commercially available Microprocessor which Sinclair made available – the SC/MP, rapidly moving onto the 8080, Z80. PIC and a dozen others along with platforms such as the Nascom, Pet, Exidy Sorcerer, S100 and finally to the PC. At that time the tools available were limited to assembly language and a simple versions of BASIC (with one exception) and I started to take a deep interest in programming, the very idea that machines might stimulate our imaginations I found instantly irresistible. Of course one gets sidetracked in hobbies and the first output of my fanatical interest was a FORTH language interpreter called SPILL which achieved only nominal recognition however in 1980 I wrote an article on some ideas for using binary trees to develop a simple AI system allowing the computer to ask the user questions and provide multiple answers depending on responses, in order to narrow down an answer to a problem – a real challenge at the time but an eye-opener as it showed me the potential of PCs for artificial intelligence. I could see the implications for gaming and wrote the article for the US publication – David H Ahls’ Creative computing. 2 days before Christmas 1980 I received a cheque for $150 dollars from the U.S. publisher and the article "Fantasia" appeared shortly thereafter.

Spurred on by this success, I developed a complete system for creating Crowther-like adventures for the Z80 Microprocessor and was rewarded by the publication of the article, covering many pages, in the prestigious "Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia”.  Many years later the magazine survived as “Dr Dobbs Journal and is now I believe it is just called "Dr Jobbs".

Peter D. Scargill : Adven-80, An Advanced Adventure Development System; Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Number 61 (November 1981).

Links to the original article for those interested in the mechanics… are here:

adven-80.arc

Source code for Adven-80 by Peter D. Scargill, plus a sample game by Robert W. Rasch. Requires a Z80-based CP/M system or emulator.

adven80.zip

Source code, manual and sample game for Adven-80, written by Peter D. Scargill. Requires a Z80-based CP/M system or emulator.

The Video Jukebox

As early developments in this sphere were mainly done before the age of the Internet, there is not much information out there I’m afraid – good job I kept press cuttings!

Around October 1982, the first product "Star Video" hit the market and was featured in most of the trade magazines at the time. At £3,500 the first machine was not cheap and in fact was a bit of a cheat, it used an American educational tape controller put together with some glue logic to handle cash input – and a graphics system I developed using a "Nascom" computer, a Z80-based machine which in it’s time was something special. The machine used only one VHS tape and took ages to find selections. That not-withstanding, we took it all over the place, starting at the world’s fair in Tokyo, my first trip out of the UK, shortly to be followed by many more.

This product developed as part of Eltech Research (subsidiary of V.I. Leisure in turn owned by Vibroplant PLC), led to our very own creation, a Z80 based, twin-VCR system using our own multi-tasking operating system. The product and it’s successors were taken all over the world and of course it was at one demonstration in the US that I met Maureen.

The demise of the jukebox thanks to major Japanese investment in video disks led us to go further afield but not before developing a range of these products including a sleek wall-mounted unit with a hideaway unit containing the twin video players and the necessary microprocessor-based control electronics.

I was then involved in a couple of minor product developments, one being a full terminal emulator I developed from scratch and which led to a badly marketed mobile Teletext-type device for presentations – a kind of early stand-alone Powerpoint called “Carousel”.

At around this time I started to develop a strong interest in higher level computer languages and packages, having started at the bottom with operating systems such as DOS –predecessors such as MDOS and migrating through using DOS, CP/M and all version of MS Windows not to mention the odd Linux package, along the way I gained more than a passing knowledge of Forth, Algol, Sam76, APL, Pascal and a load of other popular-at-the-time computer languages and a small exposure to Cobol and Fortran. As time moved on my language of choice became C and it’s successors.

"SoftSpeak" was the first widely-available product to allow speech playback on the PC, done entirely in software using the PC’s primitive tone-generating hardware to produce quite legible speech – this led to developments allowing single-chip microprocessors to record and playback speech – one result of this is the award from Arizona Microchip that still sits on my wall, presented on 27th November 1990. The product eventually featured on the front cover of Practical Computing, followed by a string of follow-ups in subsequent months. After that came a series of home-control products which featured in just about every PC magazine in the western world and at least one in Russia! Overseas magazines such as Compute! and BYTE come to mind. I became very familiar with design tools such as MPLAB, PICSTART, ICEPIC and the PCB design tool Eagle.

Of interest:

Originally as a teenager I worked in the family engineering business and in the course of cleaning out the workshops we found some wonderful old documents. I’ve some scans of old invoices/receipts from France and Company back in 1900 and thereabouts you might find interesting. See below…