Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!coherent!dplatt
From: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Looking for original ADVENTURE game
Message-ID: <29101@coherent.com>
Date: 25 Jul 89 06:11:25 GMT
References: <18655@usc.edu> <141200062@cdp> <172@dbase.UUCP>
Reply-To: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Organization: Coherent Thought Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 35

In article <172@dbase.UUCP> awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) writes:
> 
> I'd like to talk about the original Adventure--we ought to re-code it for
> the Mac as a nostalgia trip, I think.  I bet I could do a lot of it from
> memory.  I read once that the game was originally developed by spelunkers
> at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (which I thought was Boston-area) and that
> these fellows actually spent weekends exploring the real Collossal Cave.

Well, I have a 550-point version of the game... it's a superset of the
Willie Crowther / Don Woods version that I hacked up back in '78 or so.
It's written in an interpretive language... sort of like a structured
assembler... which is optimized for doing that sort of thing.  I kept
the structure of the cave itself from the Don Woods FORTRAN version, but
discarded all of the code and started afresh.  The source code for the
cave is run through a munger, which creates an encoded binary file;
this file is then read and interpreted by a small application.

I've been thinking of porting it to the Mac, but there's a hitch... it
was developed on systems that provide support for a keyed (B-tree) file
structure, and uses this feature to manage its data.   I've been too
lazy to write my own B-tree package for the Mac, and too cheap to buy one.

Now that System 7.0 has been pre-announced, and official support for the
previously-concealed HFS B-Tree manager is in the wings, maybe it's
time to take a shot at it.  I suppose there's some chance that it would
even run under System 4.2 and 6.0.whatever, since the B-Tree Manager has
apparently been part of the system for quite some time.

I know that somebody ported the 550-point version to a CP-M micro... so
getting it onto the Mac shouldn't be all that difficult.
-- 
Dave Platt    FIDONET:  Dave Platt on 1:204/444        VOICE: (415) 493-8805
  UUCP: ...!{ames,sun,uunet}!coherent!dplatt     DOMAIN: dplatt@coherent.com
  INTERNET:   coherent!dplatt@ames.arpa,  ...@uunet.uu.net 
  USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc.  3350 West Bayshore #205  Palo Alto CA 94303