A blast from the past – Meet FINSWEEP

I just stumbled over a little thing we made back in 1996. This is from the period when Navision Financials was being introduced. During a developer workshop, the teacher was trying to describe how powerful the new forms designer was (compared to the character based Navision 3.56a), he talked about the stuff he made, and ended with something like this: “I tried to make a minesweeper game, but that was beyond the limits of the designer”…

Challenge Accepted !

So the rest of the workshop was dedicated to creating a mine sweeper game, the result:
finsweep1

Some of the stuff with controls on top of each other, that when clicked on became invisible was never envisioned by Navision, and I do remember that most of the stuff was actually created in a text-editor to get around the fact that there are 64+64 controls sitting on top of each other.

The game is dated Marts 6th 1996 – and the sound about right, the object file is dated October 24 1996 – I think the difference, is that the first version of Financials did not a random function, so a psudorandom generator was created in C/AL, but since replaced with the built in random function.

finsweep2

All text are in danish, when loosing the game, you are mocked with a “Lad os håbe du er bedre til bogføring!” translated into “Lets hope you’re better at bookkeeping!”.

The “TAB …” is because I worked for a company called “TAB – The Absolut Businesspartner” – Not sure we where able to remove the leaderdots in Financials 0.99/1.00

It actually ended up in a bunch of customer installations, more or less as an Easter egg – typical hidden on the main menu, so if you clicked on the green/blue circle the game would start.
navision_financials

You can downloaded here and import and run it directly in any version up to 2009R2:
FINSWEEP

Could it be made in RTC ….