Golf's Best - St. Andrews
Alternative title: Golf's Best: St. Andrews - The Home of Golf
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Description

Golf's Best: St. Andrews - The Home of Golf is a golf simulation which allows you to experience the layout and character of one of the world's most famous courses, St. Andrews. Each hole is simulated exactly to scale. Undulations in the terrain, such as actual hills and valleys as found on the course as well as trees, bushes, water, sand and buildings are included. Wind also plays a part in the simulation. St. Andrews is a very windy course. 

The game's display provides all the information required to make a great shot. Each hole provides an overhead and side view. Wind on the course is displayed by an arrow at the bottom of the screen which points in the direction in which the wind is blowing and that your ball will tend to blow. The larger the arrow, the harder the wind is blowing. It also shows you where the ball is, how far you are from the pin, what surface you are on and what stroke you are about to hit. 

Up to 4 players can play at a time. Enter your name. Select what type of tees that you wish to play from, Medal or Championship. Once selected, they will remain the same throughout the entire round. Choose the starting hole. Pressing the Enter key without specifying the hole will start you on the first hole. You are allowed to carry 14 clubs. One must be a putter. The club selection screen also gives you the prevailing wind speed and direction. This allows you to choose the correct clubs for the conditions. After choosing your club (C), choose how hard to swing (F). Force of stroke depends on the club used. Irons and Woods choices are full, three-quarters, half or quarter swings. Wedges and putter, you enter the force as a number representing the number of feet. Your choices will be displayed. Specify what direction to hit the ball (D) and whether to hook or slice (S). Once your selections are completed, hit the "1" key to hit the ball.

Order of play is determined by honors, the player with the lowest score on the preceding hole plays first. If you select hole 19, you will enter the clubhouse and your round will be over. Display the Scorecard by hitting the "4" key. Have a good round.

Trivia

This is a portion of an email that I had received from the author, Nathan Tennies.

"...The background here is that I wrote the Apple II version first -- if memory serves, this was about 30K lines of assembly code, hand-optimized for performance and so that we could fit code, display buffer, and all three "zoom" levels of a hole, complete with contour and obstacle information, into the 48K of RAM available on the low-end Apple II. As you know, the Apple II and C64 both use the 6502 processor, and I designed this code so that it could be easily ported to the C64, which didn't have quite the RAM constraints but had its own unique challenges. We shipped the Apple II version to fab in early-March 1986...I would expect that we shipped the C64 version to fab in October or November of 1986 and that it went out to back-orders and possibly hit store shelves before Christmas of 1986.


http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/golfs-best-st-andrews-the-home-of-golf
