When I was in 7th grade at Kraxberger Middle School in Gladstone, Oregon, I got hooked on an Apple II game called Cannons and Castles. It's a two-player game in which each player tries to blow up their opponent's castle by typing the angle and velocity of the shot they want to fire, keeping in mind a hill and the wind.
A friend of mine showed me how to edit the BASIC code to make the game do all sorts of strange things - from changing the messages to making the entire screen explode in a “nuclear holocaust”. On my own, I figured out how to turn the whole screen upside-down. I still have a 5¼" disk with about twenty variations of this game saved on it.
My 8th grade year, the school got a new Macintosh lab, and I sort of lost interest in Cannons and Castles. However, I began to learn how to use HyperCard, and started doing some amazing things with it. I continued working with HyperCard, and came up with the crazy idea of porting Cannons and Castles to HyperCard. BASIC and HyperTalk are completely dissimilar languages, but I decided to try it. After working on it off-and-on for about two years, I finally finished it. However, I realized that there was a lot more I could do - add color, use more XCMDs for effects, saved games, etc. I began working on version 2.0, starting over from scratch and adding pieces of code from my first version.
The result of my efforts is finally here. Cannons and Castles for Macintosh is a shareware game created in HyperCard. It requires HyperCard 2.2 or higher (or HyperCard Player 2.2 or higher), System 6.0.5 or higher (compatible with Mac OS 9), and at least 2 MB of available RAM. You may download the game and play it for up to 30 days, after which time I ask that you either delete it or send me the $5 registration fee.