Denial

TNT wrote:(damn manufacturers don't provide device drivers if you downgrade from Vista )

OT: I downgraded from Vista too, finally I may use my PC without problems and freezing, I hope that Seven will fix all Vista problems otherwise is time for me to switch seriously to [K]ubuntu !

ral-clan wrote:...Went away for a five week work term with no internet and still haven't turned on the VIC since!

There's just no excuse for that! Shocking, just shocking...

I just found out I have to go out and "work in the field" for another four weeks. So no internet, no VIC. If you don't hear from me, I'll talk to you guys again in late October!

How about
"The Wizard And The Princess"

Not really a full txt adventure but i used to love this one...

Anyway here is a little preview of it on Youtube.....
Forget the annoying guy talking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzWiLGNNcYM

I'm reviving this old thread in the hopes of finding out if there is any updates? This seemed like a really cool project.

Failing that, I'm wondering if any of the testers are able to share any cool things regarding this as well.

Yep I think beta-testing is done now, with absolutely positive results.
Now it's up to TNT to decide whether to release a final version of the interpreter (and the working story disks), or not. Don't know if he's currently working on better versions, i.e. compatible with more adventures.

I can't see any obstacle for publication here in Denial, except maybe from copyright issues with the (once mighty) Infocom .

I personally had a lot of fun playing those masterpieces on the VIC with enhanced screen capabilities, so I'd love to see everyone enjoying them the same way. The Zork series on a humble VIC-20 is impressive, even if text adventures are not your cup of tea.

In another thread there has already been mentioned, that the "flat" memory space of 512K in the FE3 should make it possible to run most Z-machine implementations.

And then there's still the issue to fit more text on screen, well, now one can easily spend the RAM of $1000..$1FFF as bitmap to display 40 columns.

I've put a demonstrator here, with source - a routine which is optimized to write out whole lines with an ASCII charset. It has been lifted from the display routine in MINIPAINT, source included. Just load MINIGRAFIK first, then TEXT PRINT 2.

There's a driver code in the works, which reads in from a SEQ file, and prints out formatted text, with word wrap, scrolling, and is *fast*.

The routine is a by-product of another project I'm currently working on together with orion70, and Wilson had also shown interest for this routine. So I thought maybe it could be useful here, too.

Greetings,

Michael

P.S.: With a bitmap in charge, this opens up an easy implementation path to do text/graphics adventures. ... Somehow 'The Pawn' springs to my mind here.

Completely random request here... can anyone produce a standalone PRG file for me from the Magic Mirror TAP?

Not totally random reply - e-mail w/ *.prg is underway.

Mike wrote:The routine is a by-product of another project I'm currently working on together with orion70, and Wilson had also shown interest for this routine. So I thought maybe it could be useful here, too.

Greetings,

Michael

P.S.: With a bitmap in charge, this opens up an easy implementation path to do text/graphics adventures. ... Somehow 'The Pawn' springs to my mind here.

WOW! See Mike, our secret "product" is already giving good returns .
Before talking about graphics, it would be a good start if those Infocom text adventures were playable in the Final Expansion 3, using this Minigrafik implementation .

Mayhem wrote:Completely random request here... can anyone produce a standalone PRG file for me from the Magic Mirror TAP?

Here http://rapidshare.com/files/338878102/M ... r.zip.html you can download the program in PRG format

Mike sorted it for me, but cheers anyhow

Rescue from Castle Dread acquired, so that's in the next version of GB20...

Back in topic. Playing with Minigrafik (MG) and Minipaint, I realized that the VIC versions of graphic adventures, now that we have the programming tools and a lot of RAM, aren't so impossible.

Take a look at this screenshot from a Magnetic Scrolls adventure (the Pawn itself, IIRC):



I cut the graphic part and pasted into a *.pgm file, then converted it using the mg_pgm_import utility based on the invaluable Mike's MG. Finally, I added a fake 40 column text, which is also possible with MG reading from a SEQ file:



I hope you'll agree that the mixture of hi-res or multi-colour (like in this case) images and 40-col text is technically feasible, so guys, here's a suggestion for you . No hard work hand-painting the scenarios: you could capture real pictures or the original game's screenshots, and convert them into a VIC image!

PS- here's a good character for the next adventure

orion70 wrote:

WOW!

What an incredible thing this would be.

By the way....how did you get the "greyscales"?

By the way...I must apologise to TNT for sort of "crapping out" on the beta-testing for the infocom interpreter for VIC. I admire the project so much, but work responsibilities ramped up incredibly this summer - and left me without internet for a while. Beta testing five or six text adventures that take several hours to complete just proved impossible...from what little I was able to help with, though, I will say that this is one of the most stunning things I have seen on the VIC-20.