as been imprisoned. Donkey Kong's
cage is guarded by Mario,

PLOT

Mario has captured Donkey Kong and
placed him in a cage as punishment
for kidnapping his girlfriend
Pauline. You, "Donkey Kong Jr" must
rescue his father from Mario by
working his way through a series of
stages. However, Mario will attempt
to stop you by releasing animals and
putting obstacles in his way.

GAMEPLAY

With a total of four stages, and each
stage having its own unique theme,
you can run left and right by moving
the joystick and jump by pressing the
Fire button. While jumping you can
grab overhead vines, chains, or ropes
to move higher up the screen. You can
move down faster by holding only one
vine, you can climb faster if you
hold two. Watch out for the wandering
creatures that will kill on touch. To
pass the first three stages, DK Jr.
must reach the key at the top. In the
fourth stage, DK Jr. must push six
keys into locks near the top of the
stage to free Donkey Kong. After a
brief cut scene, the player is taken
back to the first stage at an
increased difficulty. You lose a life
if you touch any enemy or projectile,
or if you fall from too great a
distance, or fall off the bottom of
the screen. You also lose a life if
the timer counts to zero. Lose all
your lives and the game ends.

This is a really nice conversion that
was sadly missing for the Commodore
64. Everything feels, sounds, and
looks as far as I remember like the
original. In fact, looking on YouTube
at the original arcade and various
conversions the Commodore 64 version
seems to stand up to the quality of
the other versions. Had this been
released in the 80`s it would have
sold shed loads of units. It looks
like a really quality release from
Nintendo, but obviously this is a
home brew release. The team behind
the conversion must be complemented
on the version that is almost
faultless in its quality and
accuracy.

SCORES

Graphics: 8/10
very accurate to the original
Sounds: 7/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
a brilliant and accurate conversion

SUMMARY

This conversion and indeed any
conversion is difficult to score. Do
you score on accuracy of conversion
or the quality of the graphics and
sounds compared to other commodore
versions? So I have taken into
account the accuracy of the
conversion of the game. If I were to
make any comment, it does feel like
it's dragging on the C64 - rather
than on other versions I have played
that seem more fluid. Maybe I am just
picky!

=====================================

*************************************
FORESIGHT BRINGS HINDSIGHT TO A
COMMODORE PROGRAM
By Lenard R. Roach
*************************************

I am thankful that our illustrious
editor-in-chief and publisher Mr.
Parker will still allow me to write
for his magazine despite my absence.
My thanks to him and to you all for
your patience with this Mid-western
U.S. redneck.

Ladies and gentlemen of Commodore, as
you know times are hard all over the
world. This recession which, I think,
started with the housing market
collapse in the United States and
thus infected the finances of the
rest of the world has all of us
strapped; scraping to save whatever
dollar, pound, or Krugerrand we have
as we first as individuals, then as
nations, try our best to scramble our
wages around enough to make ends meet
and keep ourselves from losing
everything. Usually what we need to
do is just sit down with our families
and take financial inventory of what
we have coming in and, conversely, a
list of what's going out. If you keep
a careful grip on what's going where
and when, it makes it better to know
what is left and how to allocate
same.

I've been pounding on my Commodore
off and on for about 20 years now and
have, in my own estimation (no ego
problems here) come up with some
pretty good working models of money
management software written entirely
in BASIC for easy manipulation by
those who have a working knowledge of
the language. These ideas were
birthed from an idea I got from a
type-in program from "Run" magazine
back in the day called "Money Manager
with EZ Budget." Though "Money
Manager" is a capable program to
balance your checkbook and see how
bills are paid each month, I figured
in my own little redneck way that Rex
Dey (the program's creator) needed an
expansion on his idea. Thus was
written by Yours Truly a little
helper of a BASIC program whose
working name is, "The Ledger."

"The Ledger" allows the user to
record all the information about a
debt, including how much is owed and
when to pay it, then saves all that
information in a one block sequential
file on drive 8 of your computer.
Each debt has its own file so there
is little chance of mixing up the
information by the constant swap of
data that occurs sometimes with more
complex programs. "The Ledger" allows
you to make a payment on account and
records that number in the same file
as the information file.

I pulled this program out of the
cobwebs of my forgotten Commodore
software at the close of 2014 (the
program is about a two years old)
when I decided, after several (and I
mean *SEVERAL*) calls from a credit
card company to my work phone,
demanding payment on the account that
I already paid on. Having a lack of
data on the account before me made it
hard to prove telephonically that I
made the payment and to give the
proper information. My desk at home
is strewn with bills and papers so
locating information was hard. Then
it struck me one night that I sat
down at the Commodore and wrote a 27
block program that would allow me to
electronically keep track of my
bills, and give proper information to
anyone who contacted me by simply
booting up my Commodore, loading the
software, then calling up the "SEQ"
file containing the information, and
quoting from the monitor what I have
done and when.

I found the disk containing "The
Ledger" and loaded it from drive 8
into the Commodore's memory. My son
was right back when he was 11 years
old and suffering under leukemia
treatments. I was working on a play
for church one day, and when I got
writer's block he commented, "Dad,
just walk away from it for a while,
and come back to it later with a
fresh perspective." Well, being in
"cold storage" for two years allowed
me to see what I had to still do with
"The Ledger," so immediately I
started working on it again, adding
new commands like a directory reader
and an expanded menu selection. It
took me a couple of weeks of late
nights and several sheets of printer
paper looking for misplaced
semi-colons and strings to get "The
Ledger" up to a better working order.
Sure, the program was all right in
its Version 1 style, but the extra
added commands gave more control of
the data to the user. It took me
about two hours of data input to get
my twelve debts (and counting) I have
saved to one block "SEQ" files that
can be read by "The Ledger," but I
wasn't going to sit at the keyboard
waiting for the credit card people to
call; I immediately got onto the
phone and started the interaction,
but this time with "The Ledger"
loaded in front of me, I could give
the proper information as to how much
I paid, and to which office it was
sent to. This shut the hose heads up
and they just thanked me for my
information, then hung up the phone.

When a user loads "The Ledger" for
the first time, he or she is faced
with the painstaking task of entering
every bill into the program's
database. Some of the questions asked
by the File Creation subroutine may
not have an answer that can be found
on a statement, so I personally would
type "none" or "not found" in that
space to continue on. To make the
program work the best, be sure to
fill in every question asked by the
File Creation subroutine with a word,
number, or symbol. After all the data
for a bill statement is entered, the
program asks if you want to save the
data and what name you want to save
it under. Once a file name has been
chosen, the program saves that data
in the aforementioned one block data
file.

What I find f

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