Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site watnot.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!cbbrowne From: cbbrowne@watnot.UUCP (Christopher Browne) Newsgroups: net.sources.games,net.wanted.sources Subject: Re: Adventure Games Sought Message-ID: <11894@watnot.UUCP> Date: Sun, 20-Jul-86 15:52:46 EDT Article-I.D.: watnot.11894 Posted: Sun Jul 20 15:52:46 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 21-Jul-86 04:50:18 EDT References: <515@ur-tut.UUCP> <869@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 60 Xref: watmath net.sources.games:719 net.wanted.sources:2564 > In article <515@ur-tut.UUCP> sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (Dent Arthur Dent) writes: >> ... > Lighten up about micros... Without systems like the TRS-80 and the Apple II, > we wouldn't be in the middle of the "computer revolution" today. Agreed. It is only those of us lucky enough to have access to these larger, better machines that can afford to run down those "garbage machines" (I'm not serious about garbage - so no flames). The Apple II was the pioneering machine in the world of "home computing", being the first well-packaged micro. The TRS-80 was superior in some aspects, and inferior in others. Now that we have 32 bit processors running at umpteen Mhz with several hundred times the memory, we can criticize them as inferior - but only to our new, advanced machines. And that doesn't count anyway. You could not buy a nice 1986 Unix machine for less than a few hundred grand. > > I doubt you'll be able to obtain source to any of the games you mentioned. > The Scott Adams Adventures still sell. > > In any case, most microcomputer adventure games (especially the earlier > ones, such as the Scott Adams stuff, and ZORK and such) were written in > assembler. Decent high level languages for such micros are a fairly > recent (within the last two to four years) invention. There was, at the > time, no other way to get what was deemed reasonable performance. The > only "major" adventure-style games on those micros that I am aware of that > are not written in assembler are Wizardry and its sequels, which are written > in Pascal. > > > Brent > > -- > > Brent Chapman > chapman@pavepaws.berkeley.edu > ucbvax!pavepaws!chapman > > TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!) About those Scott Adams adventures, they were NOT written in assembler. Scott Adams created a file containing text (messages, object names, etc.) and numbers refering to locations of objects and text. He then made a program (originally in Microsoft BASIC for the TRS-80, later in assembler for the TRS-80 and other machines) which loads in the data and then plays the game. Pirate's Adventure was originally published in BYTE (many years ago, I recall not when) and then one of the others in Softside (a magazine which originally featured TRS-80 software, then added Apple, Atari, IBM, before its demise about three years ago). The point is that it would NOT be terribly difficult to port it to UNIX machines, in whatever language was chosen. (To those who say 'The adventures loaded in one segment - it doesn't load in data' - please note that if you do a screen dump of the 'programs', that large portions are data (obviously). In the commercial product, the program and data were merged. It would, in fact, be very difficult to convert the commercial files to portable programs, but not to obtain the original program (in BASIC), convert it to C, and then dump the data from the game and convert to C compatible data types. Certainly not a trivial job, but not nearly as hard as Brent has suggested). I have seen a public domain edition of Pirate Adventure and 'Original' Adventure (Adam's version) written in IBM PC compiled BASIC. Christopher Browne University of Waterloo