Denial

Hi all, I like playing adventure games on the Spectrum and was wondering if there were any published for the VIC? There were a few made for the 16k Speccy so it would be feasible. I'm not sure how stripped down it would have to be to run in 3.5k though.
cheers
Chris

There were 5 text adventure games written by Scott Adams and released in cartridge form.

They are:
Pirate's Cove
Adventure Land
Mission Impossible
The Count
Voodoo Castle

These are all 16K games.

The images are available on Zimmer's site and you can play them easily in Vice.

They also appear on MegaCart and will autostart when selected from the full featured menu.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

Whaaa whaaaaaaa!

An amusing play-on-words gag...

Back on topic, there's a ton of text adventures for the Vic20 ranging from unexpanded up to 16k RAM added. I currently have 63 games listed under the category "text adventure" in Gamebase20, so quite a few!

Mayhem wrote:I currently have 63 games listed under the category "text adventure" in Gamebase20, so quite a few!

Will GameBase2.0 be released prior to MegaCart?
I know we are all busy with other things in life.

It will never be perfection and things are always likely to be found after "release".

However, that's what version numbers are for.

Anxiously awaiting GameBase 2.x

Yes, v0.2 is approaching release, hang onto your helmets!

Whether it's before Megacart is another matter, there's just a few programs that need tidying up and maybe a little bug hunting, and then anything processing like this new TAPs that got posted. I'll call a halt at one point and not add more until v0.3, like all the stuff Bo has.

I'm still hoping that Frotz (Infocom universal interpreter) may be ported to the VIC one day (more incredible things have already hapened).
I don't have the skill to do it....but I've no doubt someone here has the talent.

http://frotz.sourceforge.net/

I just checked the Lemon64 forum. In the section about other Commodore computers, user TNT posted a week ago that he has made a Z-machine V4 interpreter for the PET 3032. It doesn't appear to be bug-free yet, but what is more interesting is that despite its 32K of continuous RAM, he has trouble fitting the adventure into memory. According to him, the interpreter needs to read more than 5 kB from floppy disk every time the player makes a command. He even made a point that despite the IEEE drives are faster than an IEC one like a 1541, it is sluggish to play if the game needs to load a lot of data for each command.

Then consider the VIC-20 which has at most 27.5K continuous RAM, a total of 38.5K segmented if we would use both +3K and BLK5 RAM. It may be possible to optimize the Z-machine somewhat and take advantage of those two separate memory segments, but the task suddenly seems just about as hard as the Contiki one...

Well, at least it doesn't seem absolutely impossible. Do the current Z-machine interpreters have support for the later Infocom adventures that had a bitmap graphic of the location? If they do, perhaps that part could be stripped to make the program a lot smaller (though I'm sure the guy who ported it to the PET would have done this).

We'll see if he makes any more progress. I don't know if he has written the engine from scratch based on a spec or compiled some existing code using e.g. cc65.

V1 and V2: Early Apple II and TRS-80 Model 1 games
V3: "Standard" series games, 1982-87
V4: "Plus" series games, 1985-87
V5: "Advanced" series games
V6: Later games w/ graphics, mouse support etc

Perhaps it would be enough to aim at V3, which is a format that can handle up to 128K of data: 255 objects, 32 attributes, 31 properties. Those bank switchable VIC memory expansions all of a sudden would make some sense if one is to load a 128K adventure game in one go. Apart from bigger games, V4 seems to add some character graphics, different fonts, sound effects, flashier status lines, all features not really required unless you must play a particular adventure only available in V4 format.

By the way, Jose-Maria Enguita together with Fabrice Frances in 1998 made a V3 interpreter for the 48K Oric Atmos w/ floppy drive. It is possible those last 10-15K make a big difference in playability.

There ought to be a version for the BBC Micro too. It has 32K RAM but with optional RAM/ROM expansions as well as floppy drive of course, which will be unavoidable. One just don't want to load new data every tenth second..

What about a "simple" (non Z-machine) port of the "original" text adventure Colossal Cave (or "Adventure")?

I'm wondering if having to load the interpreter + the game data for Infocom games is making the task so difficult.

Since "Colossal Cave" has its own (more basic) interpreter built in -- maybe it would be easier? Probably not, as Colossal Cave is not built in a modular fashion like the Infocom games are and would have to be present in memory all at once.

That said, seeing as Colossal Cave was a landmark game in computing history, it would be fantastic to see it on the VIC (wasn't Scott Adam's Adventureland a stripped down adaptation of Colossal Cave?).

The source code for Colossal Cave is available:

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html

But it's mostly in Fortran.

Although I did find a page for this person who has translated it into BBC Basic:

http://www.garethlock.com/acorn/caves/

I should mention, though, that there is a Z-Machine version of Colossal Cave.

Although here is a "Commodore" (I assume C64) version:

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/ ... advc64.zip

And here is an Amiga version in "C":

http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/ ... adv660.lha

All available at this site:

http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1

Welcome to the VIC-20 forum, ChrisF! To answer your request:

ChrisF wrote:Hi all, I like playing adventure games on the Spectrum

This is not good brother, you should repent and convert your soul to Commodore .

ChrisF wrote:and was wondering if there were any published for the VIC?

6502dude already pointed you to the Scott Adams Collection.
Other than those wonderful masterpieces (maps and walkthrough HERE), you can find:

- Several commercial adventures scattered among Arma's Tape Archive, kindly mirrored by 6502dude himself HERE;

- A big list of adventures in a dedicated website called VICventures, complete with solutions;

- Most of them, and more, can be found if you browse this page in Zimmers archive, and search for the string "text adventure" in the list (about 20 titles!).

- Two text adventures come from Denial:

The Evil Castle
Island of Secrets - 40 column version
Island of Secrets - 22 column version

Hope this is enough .

ral-clan wrote:What about a "simple" (non Z-machine) port of the "original" text adventure Colossal Cave (or "Adventure")?

I have mentioned it before, but someone with lots of spare time and a big interest in text adventures may look at the five Scott Adams' adventures. Not in order to play them, but compare the code - the engine if you like. What I suspect is that all five pretty much have the same code and then different data. Those are 16K games which means the parser probably is 4-8K.

One way to test this would be to take two ROM dumps, split them in "half" and merge halves with eachother. If the adventure games still are playable (depending on where your split point was), we may go on.

I remember several of Scott's later adventures were available for e.g. the C64. However I don't know if the data format used in those games would be the same as Commodore used in their VIC-20 releases. I suppose not, as they may have squeezed quite a lot to fit it all in 16K.

Do you see where I am aiming? Yes, if the engine from e.g. Pirate's Cove could be reused to play one of the latter adventures, we'd get at least a half dozen new adventures for the VIC-20. I believe the odds are slim to get this to work though.

you are a genius Carlsson!

carlsson wrote:

ral-clan wrote:What about a "simple" (non Z-machine) port of the "original" text adventure Colossal Cave (or "Adventure")?

One way to test this would be to take two ROM dumps, split them in "half" and merge halves with eachother. If the adventure games still are playable (depending on where your split point was), we may go on.

I've got a copy of Adventure ported by Jim Butterfield to the C64 all in basic. It mostly runs on the vic-20 with the 40 column software and 24k expansion but runs out of memory after a little while. It wouldn't be hard to reduce some of the text to make sure it all runs fine.