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RESCUE! CHRONOLOGY
Here's a few highlights of how my shareware program "Rescue!" for the Mac evolved during its brief lifespan. I was introduced to the genre as a kid in the 80's when I sat down at my Apple II+ and typed in the BASIC program "Super Star Trek" from David Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games", Volume I. I thought it was great, but I didn't like the turn-based, plodding pace of it. So I wrote a real-time Trek program which I modestly called "SpreenTrek" (still in BASIC, with ASCII text characters instead of graphics) for the Apple II+. No turn-based play here - it was true real-time. If you sat there and did nothing, stuff happened! In the fall of 1992 I started work on Rescue! for the Mac using Lightspeed's THINK Pascal on my Mac SE. The idea was to expand on SpreenTrek and add real graphics. I also wanted to set it in the Next Generation universe, since I was avidly watching the show at the time. There were actually ten different versions (listed at the bottom of this page); I'll spotlight three of them here. 1.0 - April 1993 Black & white only. Limited feature set. Rather primitive graphics & sounds. No Engineering menu. Only three preset missions available. Developed on a Macintosh SE. 1.6 - September 1993 8-bit colour added. Several features added. Option to continue fighting bad guys after mission complete. Improved sounds. Pause feature. Bug fixes. Developed on a Mac LC III. 2.0.5 - November 1994 Graphics revamped, lots of new features, more sounds and 4 channel sound capability. Customizable mission setup. Speed control. Better onboard navigation computer. Developed on a Mac LC III and Powerbook 150. The complete chronology of Rescue! is as follows:
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Rescue! 1.0
Rescue! 1.6
Rescue! 2.0.5
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