RetroChallenge April/May 2020: Mazies & Crazies Boss Fight

Here is the (somewhat sinister) map of the game Mazies & Crazies. In this update of my hand drawn map of my last post you can really discern the coherence of the underlying structure of DaCosta's game. This structure repeats itself 3 times. The map restarts at rooms 31 and 61, which are cognates of room 1.

Since room 1 doesn't allow a return through the top door because it has a pit trap going in that direction (i.e. the door is only one way from room 90), you can only get to room 90 by traversing the 3 levels. That makes room 90 an ideal place for a final boss battle.  So I have modified the program a little to provide this.  I have renamed the "DemiLich" monster I had been using to simply "Lich".  But in room 90 this character gets renamed "Demilich" and gets a bonus on its strength.  I also made the program put its highest ranked treasure in room 90. All other treasures and monsters only get distributed to rooms 4-89.

So now, you must seek the Demilich in its lair. This makes the game somewhat like the classic D&D dungeon adventure "The Tomb of Horrors" created by the legendary Gary Gygax. In keeping with ambiance of that adventure (if not its actual limited set of monsters), I have renamed the monsters yet again.  Here's  the current list in my version of Mazies:

1. Asp
2. Evil Dust
3. Live Axe
4. Skel-eton
5. Mum-my
6. Gray Ooze
7. Ogre
8. Lich
9. Demi-Lich

For those who don't know, a lich is an undead corpse of a powerful wizard. A demilich is the animated skull of an extremely powerful undead wizard who has gone beyond the need for the rest of his body. Great wizards usually became liches in order to continue their pursuit of magic and power beyond death. The boss of Tomb of Horrors is the Arch Demilich Acererak. He's pretty powerful, so you'll need to marshall your powers to be able to kill him in MC-10 Mazies. You'll need the shield (at least) to have a chance. Don't think the arrow will help, although it can't hurt. You might try getting the bomb and then try to lure him onto it, if you want to ensure victory.

I have also added a few more fixes and speedups to the program. The victory sound and the sound for the magic portal and pit trap have been improved. I fixed a bug that made the portal only take you to room 11. Now it will take you anywhere in dungeon except room 90.

I'm pretty sure that this program is pretty obscure, if not completely missing from the Net, by which I mean it doesn't have any playable copy available that I can find. My version of it is even more obscure again. But in case there are any hardcore fans of 8-bit BASIC RPG's out there, this is an adventure for you.

P.S. Added a listing for this game to the Wikipedia's List of role-playing video games: 1975 to 1985
P.S.S. I final read other chapters of the book, and discovered that DaCosta actually presents the map of the layout, so all my careful mapping was unnecessary.  Lesson: Don't just read the chapter about the source code.

High score of 744 After Boss Fight (and a few deaths)

RetroChallenge April 2020: Mazies & Crazies Map

I have been able to clean up the map I made last night (and wrote about in my prior post). There is definately a coherent structure, which my poor sketching skills pobably obscures a little.

The other levels just repeat this basic map, with their "Room One" occuring at 31 and 61. Each of these can be looked at as different levels of the dungeon. So You could say that DaCosta has constructed a 3 level dungeon.  Room like room 30 on this first level leads back to Room One, but you cannot go back to room 90 because of the "pit trap" which prevents going that direction.

I think another line of possible improvement of the game would be to make each level's monsters harder than the prvious. Perhaps, this could be done simply by adding a number of more powerful monsters unique to succeeding levels and with a boss fight in room 90.  At the very least, I think I will add a "Lich King" to room 90.  Or perhaps I will change all the demilich's to just "lich"s and put the demilich as the final boss. This will make DaCosta's game a little more like one of the most famous dungeon campaigns (modules) of the classic game D&D, the infamous "Tomb of Horrors".

Cool.

P.S. Corrected a bug today in the MC-10 version. I had used the "I" variable in the FOR/NEXT for my sound routine for the magic portal, that was also used by the portal routine for the room number of the random location you were to be sent to-- Result, you were always being sent to the same room number (the last number of the FOR/NEXT). Fixed it to use another "scratch" variable C.  Now you will be sent to a random location anywhere in the dungeon. I have uploaded a new version to all my storage locations.

RetroChallenge April 2020: Mazies & Crazies Gameplay

I've moved to real MC-10 hardware and finally started to seriously play the game now that I've got (I hope) all the bugs out. I've been trying to apply some technique to play so that I don't just end up being killed. I have managed to penetrate all the way to the "end" of the dungeon. The room layout is not completely linear and is a bit convoluted, as you can see. Don't think this is from errors on my part.  There is a basic coherence.

In brief, I think the maze consists of a basic plan of 1-30 rooms, which is repeated again 31-60 and 61 to 90.  I have made it to room 90 and returned to Room One, although I didn't explore most of the rooms in the 31-89 range.  As I noted in prior posts, I "corrected" the program so you can't go back from Room One to Room 90.  Don't know if that is another "error" introduced into the code on my part, but I don't think so, since the "pitfall" routine is called nowhere else, and its use makes the most sense in Room One.  It makes the game more exciting trying to figure out how to get to the higher numbered rooms and ultimately to Room 90. It is just silly to have room 90 accessible to Room One.

Made it to Room 90

Checking my Score

Step through bottom door and I'm back to Room 1

Perhaps DaCosta corrects the Room One-Room 90 bug somewhere in the text of the book as he discusses the program. Perhaps, he suggests that you correct it after having tested the higher levels by jumping to them directly from Room One. I don't know. I've only skimmed the chapter.  I'll go back and read it in more detail now. Perhaps, he wanted to give people a way to create a boss fight in room 90, and to be able to get there quickly for testing purposes. It's an example program afterall, so there are bound to be rough edges and opportunities designed to be filled in by the reader.

I can certainly think of some nice features to add.  Like I said, a boss fight of some kind in room 90 would be nice.  Some additional monsters from the core 8 would be nice too.  Different rooms for the levels 31-91 would be a possibility too, as there is no obvious technical reason for why they should repeat. It's certainly not to save memory, since they have their own data lines in the source code. One thing that would be really nice would be a game save feature. I think this should actually not be hard to implement since, almost everything of importance is held in one numeric array, and so should be able to be saved using CSAVE*L,"FILENAME" command of the MC-10.  Such possibilities are what I will explore next for RetroChallenge, if I have time.

I felt a little like a real pioneer exploring the Mazies maze.  It was a virtual space that possibly hasn't been explored by anyone in over 30 years.  Or maybe never, at least by anyone else than DaCosta.  If no one ever actually bothered to type the whole thing in, who knows, I might be the only one besides Da Costa, to have traversed it.

RetroChallenge April 2020: Finally Figured Out How to Win!

Get your Mazies hoard on!

Two posts back I discussed an apparent bug in the Quit/Score routine of Mazies & Crazies.

I thought line should be changed from this:
240 J=0:FORI=17TO48:IFL(I)=1THENJ=J+I

to this:

240 J=0:FORI=17TO48:IFL(I)=91THENJ=J+I

because otherwise it would not count which treasures you had in inventory, which are marked as being in Room 91 (your sac presumably) and not one of the 90 rooms.

However, given my last post about the rooms and the trick of not trying to return to room 90 after returning to Room One from there through the final door, it occured to me that DaCosta might have been expecting people to take treasures back to Room One and drop them there in order for them to be "counted" by the score routine. That way you could only receive reward for treasure that you had "brought back" from the dungeon.  If you made it all the way to Room 90, you would not have to go all the way back through the maze. Instead, you could be transported directly back to Room One, where you could drop your latest items and check your score.

If you select quit anywhere else in the game your score only represents the number and power of the monsters you had killed, and not any treasure, even treasure you were carrying. This had seemed a bit weird to me, but I now see the reason for it. The style of play is to foray from and return to Room One and to only check you score there. Additionally, you might use techniques for collecting treasures and taking them to way stations, before making return to bring them to Room One. Such an approach certainly adds complexity and nuance to the game play that wouldn't be present if your inventory was all that mattered in terms of score.

But why then not make it only possible to use the quit command in Room One?  Or at least give credit for treasure being carried if quit were chosen somewhere else?

There are advantages either way, but only counting treasure dropped in Room One could have been DaCosta's way to prompt the player to figure out that the game was a treasure hunt with a preferred "home base." This would need to be recognized if collected treasures were to register and a high score achieved. Whereas, if you count stuff in inventory and also Room One, as the following change would allow,

240 J=0:FORI=17TO48:IFL(I)=91ORL(I)=1THENJ=J+I

the player might never figure out the real goal of play.

It had struck me as odd that the player could not carry all of the 16 treasures hidden throughout the dungeon. So I had thought  that the goal was to find as many of the highest numbered treasures as possible, while dropping any lower ones and to kill as much as one wanted before choosing to "quit the game." In other words, I had presumed that someone would decide when they had had enough adventuring. But it now seems likely that Da Costa felt that one should play until one died, and that the real goal of the game and the way to "win," would be to quit while in Room One, with your treasure hoard all around you.

Presumably killing every monster and returning every treasure to Room One, without any "resurrection" restarts, would be the ultimate high score. This is because every time you die and are resurrected, you get a score penalty, but anything you are carrying is dropped in the room where you die. Also, anything you dropped previously in Room One will be left there. So there is a trade off to choosing resurrection and going back to retrieve treasures, or simply rerunning the game to start fresh.  More nuance to game play. It all makes sense.

So I'm changing the Quit/Score routine back to its original form.

But there must be some way to inform the player about this. Perhaps in the instructions...

New Instruction: Return treasures to Room One

As the old saying goes... you live, you learn.

P.S.
I see on page 202 of Writing BASIC Adventure Programs for Your TRS-80 that DaCosta says "J will be used to tally the score. To evaluate the treasures, a loop counts through the location array, finding treasures that reside at home home base (room 1). For each safe treasure, points are added to score J based on the treasure number." Treasures are worth anywhere from 17 to 48 points each, which means there is a total of 1040 for treasure.

The score for creatures is killed is based on the "size of the creature," according to Da Costa. Points range from 9 to 16 points each. There are 48 creatures in 6 groups of the 8 "sizes," So a max score of 8 X 16 + 8 X 15 + 8 X 14... (totally to 800) is possible.

That means the max high score for this game is 1840 if one plays without ever dying and needing resurrection, kills everything and brings every treasure back to Room One. That doesn't sound too hard.

I made some changes to the monster names, so they will format better in the 4 character space available on the right side of the screen for messages in the MC-10 version:

1. Spider -->Rat
2. Snake  --> Bad Elf
3. Land Crab
4. Scorpion --> Were Wolf
5. Huge Bee
6. Amoeba --> Gray Ooze
7. Troll --> Ogre
8. Dragon -->Demi Lich

These form better in the 4 character 2-line message space at the top right.

RetroChallenge April 2020: Why Mazies & Crazies Went Missing

Mazies-- Now with added Pit!

Allen Huffman wrote on facebook about Mazies & Crazies:

"I am really growing fond of these BASIC games you are doing. It was a really exciting time."

I replied:

"Exciting but a little tedious at times. I'm still editing this one and just found a few more typos. I can understand why the program went missing-- No one wanted to type in 90 sixty character strings (of numbers)!"

1000 R$(1)="000602540855070301062900902714-401011125401111180418"...

I noticed something strange in the code. There was a routine for a "Pit" you could fall into, but I hadn't noticed any pits yet in my playthroughs. In looking at the code I could seed that the Pit routine was triggered when you enter Room 92. This sent me to look closely at the room data to see if a Room 92 was ever listed among the exits for any of the rooms. In the course of checking, I noticed some more typos. Mostly 8s that were interpreted by the OCR of the scan as 3s. But I couldn't find any 92s.

Then I recalled being a little baffled by the ability to leave through the top door of Room One and being taken to Room 90, which is the highest number in the dungeon.  It would seem to make more sense that part of the adventure is to work your way through the dungeon to higher and higher room numbers, with 90 being the ultimate objective. Indeed the room numbers seemed to be listed in an ever increasing crescendo, with the rooms in the high 80s finally leading to Room 90.

So it seemed weird that Room One should simply let you get to Room 90 through its top door (see line 1000 above and the screen shot above). So I changed it to 92:

1000 R$(1)="000602540855070301062900922714-401011125401111180418"

Now in Room One, if you try to leave through the top door, which the two walls in the room seem almost to point you towards, down in a pit you go!  I added a little falling sound for the MC-10 version. For the TRS-80 senior version I had to fix the pause from a "I=1 TO 20" to "I=1 TO 2000," since otherwise you couldn't even see the "You've fallen in a pit" message." Now, you must struggle to get to Room 90. When you finally get there and through the final door, your are taken back to the beginning (Room One). But don't try to backtrack and return to Room 90. If you do, down in the pit you go! This is a more fitting and somewhat ironic ending for an "epic" foray into a "mysterious dungeon."

I wonder if DaCosta had left this change in to allow allow himself the ability to get quickly to the higher levels for debugging purposes, and never changed it back before sending his book to the printer.  

I also noticed that when you eat the "magic fruit" you get some random amount of healthup to several 1000s. Since the fruit returns to the rooms in which its appears whenever you leave and return, you could just pop into and out of a room many times to bump your score way above the normal 10,000 (or the 9999 in the MC-10 version since I only have 4 characters to play with on the right side for messages, instead of 8). There were no checks to prevent you from going above "full strength," which seems weird and counter to the goal of making the game a challenge.

These bugs, along with the one I found in the Score routine (discussed in my last post), and the slowness of the TRS-80 version probably annoyed anyone who actually typed in the game and left bad taste in their mouths. So when it came to people having enough affection for the game to prompt them to make sure it was preserved somewhere on the Net there was simply too little good will out there.

By replacing INKEY$ with continuous key polling PEEK(2)ANDPEEK(17023) of the MC-10 and adding some other speedups, I think the MC-10 version is really much more playable. The smaller screen size also makes moving around much less tedious. The added sounds and the color don't hurt either. With these improvements, it really is more fun.

DaCosta put a lot of thought into its construction. Without its bugs and typos, a little more speed and an instruction screen, I think it would have been fun game to play back in the day. I could see my friends and I competing for high score, which would truly represent your ability to penetrate to the higher numbered rooms, find the highest numbered treasures and defeat the largest number of the strongest monsters. If all of this could be achieved only by carefully marshalling your strength, instead of artificially pumping it up though the magic fruit bug, a high score would be truly meaningful.

But the absence of these features probably left people cold after having engaged in the monumental task of typing in and checking 90 lines of room data. Their disappointment might have prompted some to seek (literally and figuratively) to erase the game from their memory.

NEW

OK

   

RetroChallenge April 2020: Mazies and Crazies Bug Found

I've got a more fully debugged version working of Frank DaCosta's example program from Writing Adventure Games for the TRS-80 from TAB Books (1982). You can see demonstrated in the following video, the technique of using the bow and arrow by way of a cheat on startup, that puts them in the main room.  I won't tell you the secret code, but Basic programmers should be able to figure it out.

I also found what I think is a genuine bug in the printed source code. Line 240 of the QUIT and SCORE routine reads like this:

240 J=0:FORI=17TO48:IFL(I)<>1THENNEXT:GOTO242

241 J=J+I:NEXT

But it should read like this:

240 J=0:FORI=17TO48:IFL(I)<>91THENNEXT:GOTO242

241 J=J+I:NEXT

The number 91 indicates that an item, such as a piece of treasure, is in the player's inventory. This line is a part of a FOR/NEXT loop which is supposed to count up which items you have in inventory and add their value to J, which is the score variable. By searching for 1 instead of 91, the treasure items you collect never get counted and you never get any credit in your score for collecting the highest value ones (they range in value from 17-48).  Since this is an open ended RPG game, in which the purpose is to explore the 90 room dungeon until you have found the highest valued treasures and killed as many of the strongest monsters possible, this bug is kind of a bummer.

Some other changes you can see in the video besides the use of the arrow, are some slightly fixed up walls. Some of them needed adjusting because they didn't work well once condensed to half the screen width, such as the room with the chevron at the top. It didn't have a one space entrance at the bottom of the chevron as in the original. I also changed the "fire" character from a solid orange character to a checkered orange character.  Looks a little more like fire.

Some less apparent changes involve speed. I rearranged the IF checks of the monster movement routine to process blank spaces and walls first. These are the most common characters to be met as it moves, so they should be processed first so all the less frequent checks are only done when necessary-- Things like whether it runs into a potion or a fruit, for example. Found out that if the monster does run into such helpful items it gets the benefit of them instead, so don't let them get to them first.

At the end of the video you can see a 0 character. That's a bomb. If you can lure a monster onto it, it will be blow up. You can also pick bombs up to bring with you.  Just make sure to not run into it or you blow up. Move up gently and then (T)ake it into your inventory for later use.

I have emailed a copy of Mazies for the elder TRS-80 to Ira of http://www.trs-80.com/ fame.  But it can also be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xgjbd7l1JY42EmaCkjxU4yNS-XF6T2UV

My faster and more colourful MC-10 version can be played at my GameJolt Site under the "Play Our Classic 8-bit Games" link:

And the source code can be found here:
https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Dungeon/Mazies

RetroChallenge April 2020: Mazies and Crazies Working on MC-10

I've got the program basically working now in both the TRS-80 Model 1 version and for the TRS-80 MC-10. I think these might be the only working versions of this program available on the Net.  At least to the best of my knowledge. I've searched pretty intensively.

I will send the TRS-80 code to  Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site when I am a little more satisfied that I have got all the bugs out.  Still haven't managed to play to the point of getting both bow and arrows to test arrow shooting.  I have spent most of my time tweaking the maps in the MC-10 version, since the shrinking from 64 to 32 character wide screen messed up the plotting of some of the walls and doorways for a few rooms.  Basically these rooms:

28,58,88

24,54,84

6,36,66

29,89,59

20,50,80

and

4,34,64

There is a lot of repetition, so these triplets represent the same room layout, but different places in the 90 room dungeon. I think I've checked every room string for typos now.  Lots of number checking for lots of lines of code from the scan I was working from.  It runs faster on the MC-10.  And I have used key rollover PEEKing, rather than INKEY$ so the movement is smoother in the MC-10 version.  Also added a help screen at the beginning.

Next step more play testing to check fighting and scoring.  I think the goal is simply to play for high score. If you restart, items will be left where you died, but it will be a score penalty for the next round.  One neat feature is if you pick up the bomb you can drop it in the path of monster and lure them onto it, which will blow them up.  Lots of neat little features to discover. It's an interesting program, so I'm a little perplexed as to why copies don't seem to be abundant.  Perhaps I've missed something obvious.  Here's a link to the scan:https://archive.org/stream/Writing_BASIC_Adventure_Programs_for_the_TRS-80_1982_Frank_DaCosta/Writing_BASIC_Adventure_Programs_for_the_TRS-80_1982_Frank_DaCosta_djvu.txt

RetroChallenge April 2020: Mazies and Crazies

I have started working on my major project for this month's RetroChallenge, which is the conversion of the program "Mazies and Crazies" by Frank DaCosta to the TRS-80 MC-10. This program was one of the example programs included in his book Writing BASIC Adventure Programs for the TRS-80

I have already converted his text adventure example program "Basements and Beasties" from this book.  Mazies is a RPG (Role Playing Game), with simple TRS-80 Model 1/3 monochrome block graphics.  You are the @ symbol and you must do combat with a range of beasts which are represented by at least the * character, as seen in the LANDCRAB attack below.


My first task was to get the source typed back in from a scan, which I have now completed. My second task is to get the source fully debugged on an emulator for the senior original TRS-80, see how the program works, and then convert it.  So far I have a basically working copy that has allowed me to explore these first few rooms. I'll have to do a whole bunch more debugging and exploring to make sure the program is a fully working condition.

My interest in this program was raised when I explored a post from a Hungarian blogger about early text adventures in that country and the influence of a translation of DaCosta's book for school computers (Commodore 16s I think).  I went looking for the two example programs on a few TRS-80 software sites, but couldn't find anywhere that had a working copy (i.e. as a file for loading into an emulator). So it might be a "missing program" for that system, which now exists only as a scan of the book.  A comment of by Matthew Reed of TRS-80.Org says it all:

The last three chapters of the book describe the design of a “graphic adventure”: a Rogue-like adventure named Mazies and Crazies. This game is somewhat less interesting (than the example text adventure program Basements and Beasties also included) from a modern point of view, although it is still interesting as a historical snapshot.

I'll keep you folks posted about my debugging process over this month (and apparently now also May) and hopefully the beginnings of the conversion process to the MC-10.