The Secret of Flagstone Manor

My streak of interest in text adventures continues. The Secret of Flagstone Manor by Brian Betts of Mountain Valley Software is reportedly Australia's first home produced text adventure in 1981. Or so reports Renga in Blue has been playing it recently. This piece of BASIC computing history certainly peaked my interest. It would be nice to add this game to my international collection. A Los Lovag was a fun exercise in translating one of the first Hungarian text adventures. Hopefully an Australian program would not present the same degree of translation issues, although having heard some working class Aussie accents, I had my doubts. But the game text was very well written and presented no translation issues;). This is not surprising as it was not a homebrew effort, but a commercially available game.

The only issues in translation involved the large number of ELSE statements. The game was originally programmed for the TRS-80 Model 1, so using ELSE might have been a memory saving trick. I only have a couple of thousand bytes left in my version after having removed all the ELSEs, so it would have been a tight squeeze in a 16K Model 1. Another memory saving trick was the use of strings to store info about items.

Betts used a system of string arrays for items held and for items in each room. Up to 10 item strings can be "stored/dropped" for each room. I can't recall seeing anything quite like it. Most other parsers use numeric arrays to store which items are being carried and which rooms they are in. This game just moves strings around in a string array for each location with each actual item name. This method makes for a lot of string storage when saving a game, so I had to leave that part out since the MC-10 can't easily save strings.  But it likely saves memory since each item will simply represent a single byte for each character of the item, stored in string space, instead of that plus some complex numeric array structure with 5 bytes for each array item.

Renga in Blue suggested that the game had similarities Scott Adams early games, but I'm pretty sure it's not like the Adventureland parser. The BASIC version of that program is very complex (and slow) and uses lots of numeric arrays, probably because it is meant to be a generalized "engine" for multiple adventures. This one uses a more standard and simple cascade of IF/THENs to parse input for different verbs. It also doesn't read its locations into an array. There are only 18. So it just uses a sequence of IFs to print specific room info. I'd say this game does not have any specific parser "engine" at its core. It just applies some common approaches to programing adventures that had developed from 1979-1981. Except for the string array stuff re. items.

On the whole it is a very well debugged, elegantly written, BASIC text adventure program. Although the room count is small it is a fairly complex game. There is a timer aspect that can result in death, but it is fair. The puzzles make sense and there is a pretty interesting dynamic HELP command. So don't just accept the first response of "LOOK AROUND" from that command. The response eventually does change according to progress and context. The other sources of death are also generally fair, since there are clues to help avoid them. 

It was a fun exercise to port the program and add another international early BASIC text adventure program to my collection. I am currently working on De Tijdmachine, an early Dutch text adventure, which I hope to have up and running shortly, so more international fare is coming.

The source code for my version can be found here: https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Text%20Adventures/WorkInProgress/Flagstone

SPOILER ALERT -- Walkthrough below.

*** The Secret of Flagstone Manor ***

Walkthrough by Jim Gerrie 2020

GO DOOR

E

LOOK CUPBOARD

GET MATCHES

GET CAN

W

W

LOOK SHELVES

GET BOOK

READ BOOK (LAST # FOR COMBINATION)

DROP BOOK

TURN LAMP

GO OPENING

GET GARLIC,LOOK SKELETON (YOUR FATE IF YOU TAKE TO LONG)

EAT GARLIC

U

E

N

W

LOOK RACK

GET WINE,LOOK BOTTLE

PRESS PANEL

GET KEYS

E

S

GO STAIRCASE

OPEN DOOR

GO DOOR

MOVE BED

GET OPENER

OPEN CAN

DROP CAN

DROP OPENER

GET CHEESE

GO MANHOLE

OPEN CHEST

GET DIARY

READ DIARY (HINT ABOUT EATING GARLIC)

DROP DIARY

MOVE CHEST

GET ROPE

D

LOCK DOOR

GO BED

SLEEP (HEAR CLINKING CHAINS IN NIGHT)

W

OPEN DOOR

GO DOOR

D

N

N,HELP

OPEN CLOCK

GET KNIFE

E

LIGHT FIRE

GO OPENING

MOVE COBWEBS (CLUE ABOUT SECOND # OF COMBINATION)

DROP MATCHES

GET LADDER

S

W

S

S

GO STAIRCASE

GO DOOR

LOCK DOOR

GO BED

SLEEP (DREAM ABOUT LEAVING WINE IN STUDY OVERNIGHT)

W

OPEN DOOR

GO DOOR

D

N

N

OPEN DOOR

GO DOOR

LOOK DESK (IGNORE ASHTRAY)

DROP WINE

S

S

S

GO STAIRCASE

GO DOOR

LOCK DOOR

GO BED

SLEEP (YOU HAVE A QUIET NIGHT)

W

OPEN DOOR

GO DOOR

D

N

HELP

CUT PAINTING

DROP KNIFE

GET PAPER, READ PAPER (CLUE ABOUT FIRST # OF COMBINATION)

DROP PAPER

N

GO DOOR

PRESS PANEL

GO OPENING

FEED MOUSE (CLICK-- THE WALL MOVES ASIDE)

GO OPENING (YOU'LL SEE A GHOSTLY FIGURE, WHO WON'T ATTACK BECAUSE YOU'VE EATEN GARLIC)

OPEN DOOR

3

8

7

GO DOOR (DON'T TAKE GOLD YET)

TIE ROPE

S

PULL ROPE (CRASH-- YOU AVOID THE CAVE IN BY LEAVING THE ROOM)

GO DOOR

GET GOLD

GO HOLE (YOU USE THE LADDER-- YOU'VE ESCAPED WITH THE GOLD! YOU'VE SOLVED IT ALL.)