I sent my Speccy conversion in to Sinclair User magazine, who published it in their December 1986 type-in section as "Planet Proton".
In all of the intervening years, I've been 100% convinced I'd converted a TI-99/4A type-in, from one of those popular "Games to type-in and then spend days hunting for typos" books.
But, NO. It appears I MUST'VE played Harvester on the Vic-20 at some stage and thought "I could write a better version on my ZX Spectrum".
Indeed (I believe), I pulled it off!
My memory of playing a similar multiplayer game, round at a TI-994A owning friend's house and thinking "I enjoyed playing this multiplayer game. I SO want to go home and re-write this for my Speccy" is clearly a corrupt wetware memory.
I had previously been searching for a Texas Instruments source, which possibly [most likely; probably] doesn't even exist.
Just this evening, I loaded Harvester onto my Vic-20 for the "first" time and got a complete surprise.
...I don't recognise or even remember this game from my original Vic-20 owning days. I DO remember buying and playing the Trader Trilogy but I certainly don't recognise the cassette inlay cover for Harvester, yet I CLEARLY must remember having PLAYED IT, to then have re-coded it on a competing system some 2 or 3 years later. I even used the exact same player scorecard layout and playfield colours.
All these years, I've been convincing myself I'd ripped-off a crappy TI-99 game, only to discover nearly 40 years later (and completely by accident) it was an equally terrible Vic-20 game, which I have no recollection of ever playing, but then subsequently re-coded entirely from the memory of a single night, playing it with TI-99 owning friends.
What a bizarre evening.
Harvester (Vic-20)
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