While wandering the net I found a post on Bjars.com and AtariAge about a game called Indenture, which is a DOS based Adventure game written by Craig Pell in 1995-1996 based on Adventure. The nice thing I noticed was that Pell had turned all the maps of the original into ASCII text listings in his source code. Looked a bit weird when I loaded it up into Wordpad:
Transferring it to Notepad and saving it as pure ASCII text cleaned it up. The rooms were formatted for an 40 column screen so I had to do some narrowing. Most of the vertical walls were two characters thick, so I just had to cut these in half. If I could do that 8 times I had a screen that would now fit on the MC-10. Then I just had to make sure that screens that attached were thinned in a similar way so that all connecting passages lined up.
Here's an example:
180 M=1:L=4:R=4:U=9:D=2
181 PRINT"??????? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???????";
182 PRINT"? ??????? ??????? ?";
183 PRINT"? ??????? ??????? ?";
184 PRINT"? ???????????????????? ?";
185 PRINT"? ???????????????????? ?";
186 PRINT"? ???????????????? ?";
187 PRINT"? ???????????????? ?";
188 PRINT"? ?????? ?????? ?";
189 PRINT"? ?????? ?????? ?";
190 PRINT"? ?";
191 PRINT"? ?";
192 PRINT"???????????? ????????????";:RETURN
180 M=1:L=4:R=4:U=9:D=2
181 PRINT"??????? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???????";
182 PRINT"? ??????? ??????? ?";
183 PRINT"? ??????? ??????? ?";
184 PRINT"? ???????????????????? ?";
185 PRINT"? ???????????????????? ?";
186 PRINT"? ???????????????? ?";
187 PRINT"? ???????????????? ?";
188 PRINT"? ?????? ?????? ?";
189 PRINT"? ?????? ?????? ?";
190 PRINT"? ?";
191 PRINT"? ?";
192 PRINT"???????????? ????????????";:RETURN
The source I borrowed from contained many additional rooms. Had to do some research to find out what rooms were needed for the original game. There are only 0-31, as far as I can determine, including the famous "easter egg" screen (and an apparently unused room 21). Then I had to compress the images by replacing common strings with variables. This brought the size of the program down quite a bit.
I should have lots of space now for adding some combat routines. Not sure if I will slavishly follow the original, or try something a little different for combat. I'm thinking some kind of arrow shooting routine might be nice, rather than the simple sword thrust. The graphics for the characters will also probably be a little chunkier, but we'll see. At one point in the past I was thinking of these:
But with the maps I have, I think these images will be too large to be workable, but we'll see. I might just use something like these for the dragons and the bat (and sword or key):
I think I will use a simple block for the main character and possibly some ASCII text characters for items, such as a "Y" for the chalice. Not sure how I am going to handle the bridge or the "micro dot" that unlocks the easter egg. So much to be done, such as adding color to the maps. Here's a vid of some simple testing of the maps:
Have a fun RetroChallenge everyone!
I should have lots of space now for adding some combat routines. Not sure if I will slavishly follow the original, or try something a little different for combat. I'm thinking some kind of arrow shooting routine might be nice, rather than the simple sword thrust. The graphics for the characters will also probably be a little chunkier, but we'll see. At one point in the past I was thinking of these:
But with the maps I have, I think these images will be too large to be workable, but we'll see. I might just use something like these for the dragons and the bat (and sword or key):
I think I will use a simple block for the main character and possibly some ASCII text characters for items, such as a "Y" for the chalice. Not sure how I am going to handle the bridge or the "micro dot" that unlocks the easter egg. So much to be done, such as adding color to the maps. Here's a vid of some simple testing of the maps:
Have a fun RetroChallenge everyone!
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