[net.games] adventure game wanted

sibley (11/17/82)

At psuvax we have the adventure game which came with 4.1BSD.  However, it
seems not to work right.  The pirate never appears, not even when you
collect all the treasures.  This means the treasure chest never exists, so
you can't get ALL the treasures or get to the endgame.

There also seem to be other less serious bugs, like the fact that some of
the stuff in the well-house appears to be also in the same room as the
dragon (version of the room with sleeping dragon).

Of course, I'm not completely sure that this version is supposed to work
like the one I first learned, but I suspect it is because it has some of
the same bugs.  (E.g., certain of the descriptions can be "taken.")

Unfortunately, we don't have the source (maybe nobody does).  Does anybody
have a version of adventure which works correctly on 4.1BSD?  Source
would be greatly appreciated.

I realize rogue and zork are better games, but it is a shame not to have a
working version of this classic.  By the way, is the distributed version
of aardvark also buggy or is it supposed to work that way?

Dave Sibley
Department of Mathematics
Penn State University
psuvax!sibley

mark (11/17/82)

The problems noted with the 4.1BSD Adventure are indeed problems.
Another equally serious bug is that saving games doesn't work.
A somewhat minor bug is that it does not even line buffer output.
(4.1BSD!/usr/games/adventure is a very old 32V binary that even
Berkeley does not have the source to, so these bugs can't be fixed.)

The fix is quite simple, however.  On your "tape2" with the sources
to the other games is the source to a different translation of
adventure (the Rand translation).  If you just recompile it from that
source, it will work.  One disadvantage of this version is that saved
games create huge executable files, taking up disk space and making it
harder to enforce the playing only during certain hours of the day.

One note of caution: when you do the "make", DO NOT divert stdout into
a file (this is a common thing to do with big makes that you don't feel
like waiting for).  The makefile will compile the source into an a.out,
then run the a.out, which inhales the data file and saves itself in
another executable called advent.  If the a.out is run with stdout diverted
to a file, stdout will be block buffered, even when you run the game
itself.  This makes the game somewhat less interactive than you would
expect.

I am surprised that Berkeley sent out the old binary with the new sources,
since they make it a practice to recompile the world every few months
to prevent just such a happening.  Apparently this does not extend to
/usr/games.

	Mark