About WinBowl

Hi,
I'm the creator of WinBowl. My name is Tom Bernthal and I live in Arizona with my wife and our six children. My kids know me as the coolest dad on the planet.

One of my hobbies is computer programming, and WinBowl is really just a spare-time project for me. Although I studied Computer Science at the University of Montana, I eventually went on to Seminary and became a Pastor. I currently serve as pastor of a Lutheran Church in southern Arizona.

How WinBowl Came into Being

As a big fan of golf, I was excited about all the wonderful computer golf games that started coming on the scene back in the late 1980's. But I was also looking for a computer bowling game that had the same qualities of semi-realism and fun. Unfortunately, none were to be found. A computer programmer friend and I decided we would take it upon ourselves to tackle the job. That was back in 1991. The idea never really got out of the drawing room, but, the seed was planted...

Over the next 3 years I occasionally thought about ways to implement the game, but I never really sat down and worked at it. Then in the Fall of 1994, I was thinking of a Christmas present to give the children of a very good Pastor friend of mine. Since they are all very much into computers, I decided to write a program for them. I finally had some incentive to actually tackle the bowling game project. Within a month I had a basic bowling game that worked. It wasn't what I had originally envisioned, but it was still pretty fun. It used 2D graphics with an 'overhead' view looking straight down at the alley and pins.

The kids liked the game a lot and suggested that I offer it as shareware. So I made some modifications, named it WinBowl, and posted it on AOL and waited to see what would happen. A lot of people downloaded it and I received many nice comments and even a handful of registrations. But I wasn't really satisfied with it. So in the Summer of 1995 I redesigned the whole game, giving it a 3D look and adding some basic sound support. Mainly because of the limitations of my own computer hardware, the game size was restricted to a small window. But that was the start. And it ended up being quite popular, getting a good review in Computer Shopper magazine in March of 1996.

Since then I continued to add improvements as much as my own time permitted. With version 3.0, I finally acheived a semblance of what my original intentions were. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1997 I lost about 80% of the source code for WinBowl 3.0 in a series of unfortuante accidents compounded by a computer virus. It took me nearly a year to reconstruct the code, and then life got busy. Version 3.2 is coming out over 2 years since the last version. Before the crash I had been posting new verisons about every 6-7 months. Your suggestions and support have been invaluable in the development of WinBowl. Keep them coming!

WinBowl is written almost entirely in the 'C' programming language. A few of the time-critical routines are written in inline assembly language, but these amount to only about 1% of the overall code. The 'C' compiler used for development is Microsoft's Visual C++.

Version 3.2 is now a 32-bit program. Version 3.0 is the last of the 16-bit versions of WinBowl, and while I will keep it available for download as long as people want it, I can no longer make any improvements to that version. Version 3.2 is a transitional version. I may still have a few more releases yet with the 3.0 look, but I am also working on a totally new 3D version. Time will tell if I can get it working well enough for distribution.