sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (07/16/86)
The recent posting of Adventure has once again reminded me of those
Scott Adams Adventure games, like Adventureland, Pirates Island, Mission
Impossible, etc.... Does anyone out there know of where I might be
able to acquire the source to these games, especially adventureland.
The only versions I have had access to were the ones for the Trash-80
and the Apple ][. No flames, I realize that these are pathetic machines.
I had to use the Trash back in high school and never, thank god, had to
use the Apple. What I really need is the source. Almost any language is
acceptable, but C is preferable and Pascal is a distant second. These
games were great and I would really like to be able to play them again.
Thanks,
-- Dent Arthur Dent
uucp: {seismo, allegra, decvax, cmcl2, topaz, harvard}!rochester!ur-tut!sag2
BITNET: SAG2@UORVM
Physical:43 01' 40'' N, 77 37' 49'' W
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| A quickie from Doctor Who. Answer the same as before. |
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--------------------------------------------------------------------chapman@pavepaws.UUCP (07/17/86)
In article <515@ur-tut.UUCP> sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (Dent Arthur Dent) writes: > >The recent posting of Adventure has once again reminded me of those >Scott Adams Adventure games, like Adventureland, Pirates Island, Mission >Impossible, etc.... Does anyone out there know of where I might be >able to acquire the source to these games, especially adventureland. >The only versions I have had access to were the ones for the Trash-80 >and the Apple ][. No flames, I realize that these are pathetic machines. >I had to use the Trash back in high school and never, thank god, had to >use the Apple. What I really need is the source. Almost any language is >acceptable, but C is preferable and Pascal is a distant second. These >games were great and I would really like to be able to play them again. Lighten up about micros... Without systems like the TRS-80 and the Apple II, we wouldn't be in the middle of the "computer revolution" today. I doubt you'll be able to obtain source to any of the games you mentioned. The Scott Adams Adventures still sell. In any case, most microcomputer adventure games (especially the earlier ones, such as the Scott Adams stuff, and ZORK and such) were written in assembler. Decent high level languages for such micros are a fairly recent (within the last two to four years) invention. There was, at the time, no other way to get what was deemed reasonable performance. The only "major" adventure-style games on those micros that I am aware of that are not written in assembler are Wizardry and its sequels, which are written in Pascal. Brent -- Brent Chapman chapman@pavepaws.berkeley.edu ucbvax!pavepaws!chapman TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)
chapman@pavepaws.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman) (07/18/86)
In article <869@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> chapman@pavepaws.UUCP (Brent Chapman) writes: >I doubt you'll be able to obtain source to any of the games you mentioned. >The Scott Adams Adventures still sell. > >In any case, most microcomputer adventure games (especially the earlier >ones, such as the Scott Adams stuff, and ZORK and such) were written in >assembler. Decent high level languages for such micros are a fairly >recent (within the last two to four years) invention. There was, at the >time, no other way to get what was deemed reasonable performance. The >only "major" adventure-style games on those micros that I am aware of that >are not written in assembler are Wizardry and its sequels, which are written >in Pascal. I have since been informed that the source to Scott Adam's "Pirate Adventure" appeared in BYTE several years ago. Pirate Adventure is a low-level, "introductory" game, that generally takes 2 to 4 hours to solve. It might still be of interest to you, though. I have no idea what issue it appeared in, or even what year. This is second-hand information. Sorry about that. Brent -- Brent Chapman chapman@pavepaws.berkeley.edu ucbvax!pavepaws!chapman TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (07/18/86)
>In article <515@ur-tut.UUCP> sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (Dent Arthur Dent) writes: >>The recent posting of Adventure has once again reminded me of those >>Scott Adams Adventure games, like Adventureland, Pirates Island, Mission >>Impossible, etc.... Does anyone out there know of where I might be >>able to acquire the source to these games, especially adventureland. In article <869@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> chapman@pavepaws.UUCP (Brent Chapman) replies: >I doubt you'll be able to obtain source to any of the games you mentioned. Actually, that depends. The `real thing' may be unobtainable, but I have versions of both Adventure Land and Pirate's Adventure. Not so long ago (about six years), in a place not very far away (30 miles by road from where now I sit), someone gave me two BASIC programs that implemented these two adventures. The programs themselves were identical save for a series of DATA statements. (Incidentally, to forestall a potential argument, I recall no copyright notices in the programs.) Curious, I traced the logic of the program, and discovered that the numbers in the DATA statements were composed of pairs of bytes, and each byte an instruction: a word value, a test, or an action. The strings in the DATA statements were rather more obvious. I made a list of these instructions and decomposed all the magic values. I then knew just what went into the adventures. One of the first things I did after I got my Unix(R) account, and had learned enough C, was to write an adventure compiler and interpreter. (I used yacc to write the compiler: a rather curious way to learn formal grammar. Incidentally, the compiler itself was terrible. So was the interpreter, for that matter; but that should be expected from one so inexperienced. Ah well.) In due course the interpreter ran. It used curses. Some years later, while cleaning out my old files, I stumbled across those dusty directories, and decided to give those programs some well-deserved polishing. I rewrote much of the interpreter, and used my window library to do the display, eliminating one of the more serious problems inherited from curses: it would now use line delete, if a terminal supported that. I reformatted the compiler sources, but left them largely unchanged, for it was not worth more effort: it needed replacement, not tuning. To shorten the story---though it will get nothing but longer as I type---, I posted this later version of the interpreter, and the compiled data files for Adventure Land and Pirate's Adventure, to net.sources.games. Chris Miller of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland provided changes to the interpreter to once again use curses (for few have access to my window library), and also wrote a decent compiler for it. He even turned both data files back into source! So, in sum, you *can* get copies of two very Scott-Adams-like adventures. No doubt they have some differences from the `official' versions; and if those do indeed still sell, they may even be illegal (though for the nonce I shall assume otherwise); but they are out there. They are available. (The files involved are rather large, so unless you are very close to umcp-cs uucp-wise, or have exhausted all shorter routes, please do not ask me for copies: your local net.sources.games packrat likely has one that will not cost seismo money to send.) -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 1516) UUCP: seismo!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@mimsy.umd.edu
toma@tekgvs.UUCP (07/18/86)
In article <515@ur-tut.UUCP> sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (Dent Arthur Dent) writes: > >The recent posting of Adventure has once again reminded me of those >Scott Adams Adventure games, like Adventureland, Pirates Island, Mission >Impossible, etc.... Does anyone out there know of where I might be >able to acquire the source to these games, especially adventureland. >The only versions I have had access to were the ones for the Trash-80 >and the Apple ][. No flames, I realize that these are pathetic machines. >I had to use the Trash back in high school and never, thank god, had to >use the Apple. What I really need is the source. Almost any language is >acceptable, but C is preferable and Pascal is a distant second. These >games were great and I would really like to be able to play them again. Adventureland and Pirates Island were originally done in BASIC. There source was published in two issues of Softside. Scott Adams later rewrote everything in Assembler for much better performance. I would post the sources, but unfortunately they are not public domain! Tom Almy Tektronix
jim@randvax.UUCP (Jim Gillogly) (07/19/86)
In article <869@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> chapman@pavepaws.UUCP (Brent Chapman) writes: >In any case, most microcomputer adventure games (especially the earlier >ones, such as the Scott Adams stuff, and ZORK and such) were written in >assembler. Decent high level languages for such micros are a fairly >recent (within the last two to four years) invention. There was, at the >time, no other way to get what was deemed reasonable performance. Buzz. Wrong. The ZORK games were written in ZDL (recursive acronym for Zork Definition Language). ZDL was a sort of subset of MDL (pronounced MUDDLE) which in turn was a superset of LISP. ZDL was written up in Byte a few years ago, I believe. The original Adventure was written in FORTRAN. I rewrote it in C in 1976, and ported the C version to an H89 in about 1979 or 1980. The performance was and is reasonable. There have been several dungeon definition languages marketed as well. To be fair, some adventure games have been done in assembler as well. J. Gordon Lettwin's excellent port of Adventure was in 8080 assembler, for example. -- Jim Gillogly {decvax, sdcrdcf}!randvax!jim jim@rand-unix.arpa
cbbrowne@watnot.UUCP (Christopher Browne) (07/20/86)
> In article <515@ur-tut.UUCP> sag2@ur-tut.UUCP (Dent Arthur Dent) writes: >> ... > Lighten up about micros... Without systems like the TRS-80 and the Apple II, > we wouldn't be in the middle of the "computer revolution" today. Agreed. It is only those of us lucky enough to have access to these larger, better machines that can afford to run down those "garbage machines" (I'm not serious about garbage - so no flames). The Apple II was the pioneering machine in the world of "home computing", being the first well-packaged micro. The TRS-80 was superior in some aspects, and inferior in others. Now that we have 32 bit processors running at umpteen Mhz with several hundred times the memory, we can criticize them as inferior - but only to our new, advanced machines. And that doesn't count anyway. You could not buy a nice 1986 Unix machine for less than a few hundred grand. > > I doubt you'll be able to obtain source to any of the games you mentioned. > The Scott Adams Adventures still sell. > > In any case, most microcomputer adventure games (especially the earlier > ones, such as the Scott Adams stuff, and ZORK and such) were written in > assembler. Decent high level languages for such micros are a fairly > recent (within the last two to four years) invention. There was, at the > time, no other way to get what was deemed reasonable performance. The > only "major" adventure-style games on those micros that I am aware of that > are not written in assembler are Wizardry and its sequels, which are written > in Pascal. > > > Brent > > -- > > Brent Chapman > chapman@pavepaws.berkeley.edu > ucbvax!pavepaws!chapman > > TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!) About those Scott Adams adventures, they were NOT written in assembler. Scott Adams created a file containing text (messages, object names, etc.) and numbers refering to locations of objects and text. He then made a program (originally in Microsoft BASIC for the TRS-80, later in assembler for the TRS-80 and other machines) which loads in the data and then plays the game. Pirate's Adventure was originally published in BYTE (many years ago, I recall not when) and then one of the others in Softside (a magazine which originally featured TRS-80 software, then added Apple, Atari, IBM, before its demise about three years ago). The point is that it would NOT be terribly difficult to port it to UNIX machines, in whatever language was chosen. (To those who say 'The adventures loaded in one segment - it doesn't load in data' - please note that if you do a screen dump of the 'programs', that large portions are data (obviously). In the commercial product, the program and data were merged. It would, in fact, be very difficult to convert the commercial files to portable programs, but not to obtain the original program (in BASIC), convert it to C, and then dump the data from the game and convert to C compatible data types. Certainly not a trivial job, but not nearly as hard as Brent has suggested). I have seen a public domain edition of Pirate Adventure and 'Original' Adventure (Adam's version) written in IBM PC compiled BASIC. Christopher Browne University of Waterloo
eau@basser.UUCP (07/21/86)
In article <882@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> chapman@pavepaws.UUCP (Brent Chapman) writes: >I have since been informed that the source to Scott Adam's "Pirate Adventure" >appeared in BYTE several years ago. The BASIC source for Scott Adam's AdventureLand was printed in an BYTE, November 1980 (could be 1981, but I think 1980). This was a special issue on Computer Games. It had various articles on Adventure games, including one by the authors of ZORK. Eric Andre' Ulevik ACSNET: eau@basser.oz Basser Dept. of Computer Science CSNET: eau@basser.oz The University of Sydney ARPANET: eau%basser.oz@seismo.arpa NSW 2006 Australia UUCP: {seismo,hplabs,mcvax,ukc,nttlab}!munnari!basser.oz!eau