"Astronave Farmer" or "Spaceship Farmer" in English is a text adventure game I've ported to Micro Color BASIC originally programmed for the Sharp MZ80B. I also translated it from Italian. This seems to have been a well loved game. There is an article about it (in Italian) in RetroMagazine by Antonino Porcino. It is from 1985. I'm not sure if there are earlier Italian text adventures, but this is earlier one than the other Italian adventure I have, "Atzeco Adventure," which Gary from over on the CASA Solutions Archive converted and translated when I brought it to his attention. It was from a magazine for the VZ-200, so I thought it would be an easier job converting it to MC-10, since they both share the Motorola MC6847 video chip. But Gary is a real fan of that system and when he heard of a program that didn't seem to be part of the software archive for the system, he immediately set to getting it in working order and well translated. He said he found lots of spelling mistakes. I take this mean spelling mistakes in the original Italian-- probably with the distinctly Aztec terminology. The game was probably made by a young Italian who wasn't overly concerned with the anthropological niceties of meso-America cultures. When I converted Garry's translation to MC-10, I also added a semigraphic-4 meso-American image for the title screen.
When I did my translation of Astronave I asked folks from the Facebook group to try out the rough early version. Greg Dionne found some bugs by running it thought his BASIC compiler-- variables the weren't declared, which was probably a byproduct of Google translate. Otherwise Google translate seems pretty good at ignoring the BASIC command parts of the text, and just translating the messages for the most part. This wasn't the case a few years ago. You had to snip out the text messages, otherwise Google would garble all the BASIC commands. Walter Zeick pointed out some verbs that Google had failed to translate well (that is to say in keeping with two-word parser conventions). I also had to go through and tweak the translation in a few places. Some phrases just seem completely colloquial, like "Light up your beard hippogriff!", which I just left as is. I had to make some guesses, but I hope it's pretty faithful to the original. There is some clever humour in this adventure and some biting sarcasm in the remarks of your "puppet" or "alter ego" acting as your hands eyes and ears in the adventure. Having now played the game to the end, I think I can understand why it is remembered with such fondness.
**SPOILER ALERT** (Below is a complete map of the adventure.)
There are only a few instant deaths that can't be anticipated, so you will have to play this one a few times if you are going to solve it on your own. The puzzles are not overly hard. Modern IF players will of course complain about the arbitrariness and limited vocabulary. But as 8-bit adventures go this one is pretty fair and reasonably coherent. It's a nice little jaunt for an hour or two. It has a hidden message in the code that you will only be able to (easily) see by playing the game through to the end yourself. I have altered that secret code subroutine to present the message in English If you need some help here's the map:
The source code can be found here:
https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Text%20Adventures/Astronav
ASTRONAV can be played online (at least for a little while) here:
http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/MC10/JG_MC_Text_Adventures.html
