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Wonderfully ambitious and original simulation from the master himself. At a time when an industry was content to shoot space aliens, Chris Crawford dared to imagine greater possibilities for video and computer games, and for that alone SCRAM is a classic. |
| Looking at the (BASIC) source code, the program requiring only 16KB RAM is a newer version 1.4 than the program requiring 24KB version 1.3 . The one needing 16K memory is also larger and more advanced because it loads in two or 3 segments not one or 2. So the "24K" game counterintuitively offers nothing new and might be worse than the "16K" version. Hi, Chris! |
| I'm working on porting this to Python. If anyone else could give me a hand in the next few weeks shoot me an email dthomas2622 [at] gmail [dot] com. Need a hand with some of the thermodynamic algorithms. |
| this game was prophetic.
too bad its a planet killer.
ive been thinking about rewriting this. soon.
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| Thankfully, the manual has been preserved here - and you really do need it to play (also used it for science homework once!). Released pre-Chernobyl, this relic of the nuclear age makes the heavy-going sciences of nuclear energy as enjoyable as possible, as you battle to keep your power plant operational in an earthquake zone. |
| An interesting 'game'. Really a simulation, but still good fun. The instruction manual is intense; containing large excerpts from the investigation of the Three-Mile Island accident, and a lengthy discussion of how a Nuclear power plant works. Heady stuff for the time, even now...
This was also my first video game hack. The program was coded in Atari BASIC. You would first load the code from cassette (yes, cassette tape), and then run it. Before you ran the code, you could alter it if you took the time to understand a bit of it. Anyway, I altered it so that the generator was not capped for maximum power output; also increased the number of workers by a factor of 10. (workers were vital to repair damage, and were a consumed resourse; you could only use a group once due to radiation exposure rules, damn you NRC!)
Melting down the reactor was always good for a grin. And the alarm sound for 'Steam Voiding' still enters into select nightmares of mine.
If you can get ahold of the manual (not my copy, sorry) this is certainly worth the time. Otherwise I doubt you will have a clue what is going on. |
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Other versions with the same title:
Atari, Atari Italia.
It appears Atari's German division officially imported the original edition of the game before the program was fully translated and repackaged.
Released in France as Centrale Nucléaire.
Missing original tape image! |
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