I ran across an interesting looking game ported to the MZ-80 by Joachim Froholt. He mentioned in the blurb for his YouTube vid that:
I translated Takaya Arita's Sharp MZ-80K classic Cavern 2160 to the Sharp MZ-80A (& english).
When I hear someone describing a Basic game as a "classic" my ears immediately pluck up. What is this classic of which you speak? The original game was published as a program listing in the July 1980 issue of I/O Magazine in Japan. I asked Joachim if he had a copy of the original source. He kindly pointed me towards a place where I might find a scan of the article. In the end I decided to simply look up as many videos of the game being played as I could to recreate what I saw using my own code and coding tricks to get speedy animation out of the MC-10. I did eventually get a scan, which was helpful in resolving a few details of the operation of the game, although I am still not sure if I have fully implemented the game, or implemented it with complete fidelity. For example, in my version there is an ultimate time limit. You get quite a bit of time to build your score, but as you do the game gets slightly harder in regular jumps (signaled by some random beeping). At these points the time it takes for the snakes to come back to life after falling shortens. But also, you can reach a point when the time will simply run out. That being said. I have never been able to play to that time.
The original game is described as a classic because, to quote the retro gamer blog:
Dr Takaya Arita’s game is a milestone release from 1980 – it has been considered “the original sandbox game,” and is a strategic digging game that arrived a good couple of years before the likes of Dig Dug and Mr Do. 36 years on, Mindware is now releasing the game on PC, in three different forms. The original version for the Japanese Sharp MZ-80 computer will be converted, and two remixed versions will be provided – one built to the specs of the Sharp MZ-700, and another built as a classic Eighties arcade game.
The game seems like it would be simple, but it takes a lot of strategy to remove earth in a way that prevents the snakes from overwhelming you or sneaking past and making their way to your "base" and thus, defeating you. I was able to find various version and ports to other system, including one with a pixel text drawn version of the original Japanese name of the game, which I was able to recreate as a title screen for my version. Strangely enough when I sent Joachim a video of the game I had recreated he noticed my port of "The Valley" and sent this message:
BTW, I see your last project was The Valley, that's a fun coincidence,
because I was involved with a version for the Sharp MZ-80A just
recently. I only did playtesting for that one. An interesting little
game, more fun than I originally thought it'd be. Here's a video:
It's a small world when porting projects are being done in such similar succession. Perhaps it's a sign that the pool of "classics" is somewhat limited. Maybe I'm coming to end of it! Let's hope not. Anyway here's the vid of my version:
Nuclear Submarine Adventure was a text adventure published in 1980 by Aardvark Software. Its author was Robert J. Retelle, who also wrote the Star Trek Adventure that I ported recently. Versions exist for the C64/128, OSI/Compukit, TRS-80, TRS-80 and CoCo. It seemed time to make a version for the MC-10. The source code was provided to me after an inquiry to the Coco e-mail list, by Guillaume Major, who oversees the Coco Archive. I found out about the game because Colin Appleby of the Grundy Newbrain Emulator site, asked me on solution archive forum whether I had the source. That sent me to Curtis Boyle's Coco game website. An inquiry to Curtis via the e-mail list (maintained by Dennis of maltedmedia.com) prompted him to respond that he couldn't place his finger on a copy of it, but the posting prompted Guillaume to hunt up a copy from some obscure disk and put it up on the archive. That's a lot of work being done by a lot of different people sharing across the internet to facilitate the retrocomputing hobby!
Anyway, SPOILER ALERT! Below I have included a walkthrough and a map thatI created as I game tested the ported source code. I had to simplify all the fancy music. This included a routine that ran a submarine "ping" noise while you are prompted to enter your command. No great loss... I found the ping a little annoying.
I think I found an error in the save routine. It didn't seem to preserve the variable that recorded that you had used the chair to smash open one of the hatches. So every time you saved you had to get the chair again and re-smash the hatch. I added that variable to the save routine. I also added the synonym "GET" for the "TAKE" command, and the options to use U,D,F,A as shorthand for GO UP,GO DOWN,GO FORWARD and GO AFT.
Found out "The Valley" actually started out as a very popular type-in for the Commodore Pet, which was then ported to a variety of systems including the original TRS-80 Sharp MZ-80, BBC and Apple. Here are some links discussing it:
I think, from what I have read that this classic RPG was first published in Computing Today April 1982. I was able to get a listing and based on that and the viewing of many pictures of various versions, I realized that the Newbrain version had departed from the original in some ways. The most obvious was that instead of having two castles at each end of the central "path," the Castles were simply placed randomly. Also, the map was redrawn every time you entered the valley scene from one of the other scenes (Swamp, Forest, Tower). By pouring over the original listing I was able to restore the game's function to be more like the original Pet version. I was also able to clean up the graphics quite a bit, such as making the castles look a little more like castles and the tower more like a tower. Adding better collision detection also prevents attribute clash between these elements. Now the save game feature actually saves the map info so the valley remains steady from saved game to saved game. Lots of other minor fixes too. Here's how it looks now:
Now forests and swamps, like in the Pet version, are two characters wide. The tower is two characters high. Also revamped the beginning instruction screen to provide more detail about the keys used in the program and revamped and sped up the key input to allow for the option to use all eight directions, instead of just up down left and right, as I think it was in the Newbrain version (which made moving very tedious). Now you can use either:
QWE
A D
ZXC
or
TYU
GH
VBN.
The original used the numeric keypad for movement. Since mine uses the left letters of the keyboard you must press R instead of E to get a report of your rating level and what items you have recovered. I also changed the map routine for the Tower, Lair and Temple so that it used the original Pet routine:
Now the maps are much smaller (and less tedious to explore) and more interesting than the ones generated by the Newbrain code:
I also changed the lake and island drawing routine for the Swamp and Forest to use the Pet code. On the whole it has been a very satisfying project. I've learned about a classic RPG and done some intensive code fixing with the help of a very nice article published in Computing Today back in 1982...
Here's my final project of the October Retrochallenge. I finished just a little too late to make the 31st deadline, but in the spirit of better late than never, I'll post about a porting project I embarked on over the last week to help cheer myself during one of the most challenging times I have at work every year, midterms! Lot's of marking of exams and papers makes this a time, along with mid-winter, that I really need some pleasant distraction.
Grundy Newbrain 8-bit computer
I am a member of the CASA website "Solution Archive" dedicated to Interactive Fiction, including classic adventure games. Colin Appleby joined the group and asked a lot of questions in the "classic forum," about adventures with versions for the Grundy Newbrain 8-bit computer of the UK. He was looking for games for this quirky little 8-bit machine, which was a little like the MC-10, in that it never really gained a big enough market share to be considered one of the mainstream home computers. Like the MC-10, it was bit of an outlier, which is just one of the features that can make a machine so endearing as an object of retrocomputing interest.
One of the games Colin mentioned in his posting was a Basic RPG called "The Valley." This, of course. elicited some complaints from the IF purists in the group that it wasn't really an example of interactive fiction or text adventuring. I think such distinctions are rather arbitrary and was quite happy to hear that Colin had made the file available on the Newbrain emulator site. I am always on the lookout for basic source code!
Kayde Manual
The game is from the Kayde company and was originally distributed on tape. Colin's distro not only included a file for loading into the emulator but also the text source code. Oh how I wish everyone who distributed Basic games for emulators did this! It means you don't have to figure out a new system, its emulator and all the tricks about how to get a Basic file in text format out of the system. The source also lists Chris Despinidis as contributing some debugging. I think Chris is the maker of the Newbrain emulator. See: http://www.newbrainemu.eu/ for more info about the Newbrain.
The Newbrain has a 40X24 screen and the game uses simple "text graphics." Since the MC-10 doesn't have 24 lines, it was useful to be able to use the 64X32 8 color low-res graphics to recreate the text maps. Instead of using various characters to represent the objects on the map (forests, lakes, castles, dark tower, woods, safe path, swamp) I was able to use colours. I also had space left over on the right hand side to put a colour key to explain what each colour represented, since 64-40=24 dots or 12 characters. Luckily there weren't too many items, so 8 colors and black were basically enough to represent everything needed for the maps, with only a little careful doubling up of some colours for slightly different uses on the 3 basic types: terrain, forest/swamp, and castle/tower. The result is a little speedier than the original (I was able to get the game up and running on the Newbrain emulator to help with the porting project), which I think is simply because the MC-10 was developed about 3 years later. As usual, I never know if I have fully debugged, but I will continue to play the game for a while and hope to weed out any that may be left.
In fact, I think I might have spotted some bugs in the original source. I shared this info with Colin on the MC-10 Facebook page. I found an error in line 3820 of the original source that I had downloaded (back in September) that involved a missing colon before a PUT command (how the Newbrain outputs special characters to the screen). Having had my source for some time it's possible Colin or Chris has debugged it in the meantime. I also noticed that line 9000 should probably have had a GOSUB20000 in it instead of GOSUB2000, since the former was a commonly called subroutine, whereas the later was definitely not. However, this GOSUB would possibly never have been triggered in the original because it was in an IF statement looking for a character 230, which I could not find "PUTed" anywhere in the source. My best guess was that a code 254 was what was really needed and adjusted my MC-10 version accordingly to use the right POINT check (to sense the color of the screen locations and return a number from 0-8 for the color found). The command now randomly triggers a message that there is no entry to the buildings on the islands (in the middle of swamps and forests) from the direction one is coming and to seek another route in. So perhaps, the MC-10 version has a feature that even the Kayde original lacked?!
Thanks to John and the other participants in the Retrochallenge, and to Colin and Chris over on the Newbrain site for sharing their retrocomputing enthusiasm!
