The 8K adventure
Paul Allen Panks
I am curious if anyone has succeeded in writing in a full-blown text
adventure (with advanced parser) in just under 8K of RAM?
The reason(s) for my question stem from my days as a Commodore Vic-20, 64,
and 128 computer owner/user. Well, I still do use and own all of such
equipment.
Anyways, 8K sounds about right for small to medium sized adventure games.
Has anyone even managed 2K adventure games (the smallest text adventure,
from my experience, occupied 3,583 bytes on a Commodore Vic-20)?
Sincerely,
Paul Allen Panks
dun...@yahoo.com
--
pa...@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
Harry
<pa...@sdf.lonestar.org> made the world a better place by saying:
>Hello,
>
>I am curious if anyone has succeeded in writing in a full-blown text
>adventure (with advanced parser) in just under 8K of RAM?
>
>The reason(s) for my question stem from my days as a Commodore Vic-20, 64,
>and 128 computer owner/user. Well, I still do use and own all of such
>equipment.
>
>Anyways, 8K sounds about right for small to medium sized adventure games.
>Has anyone even managed 2K adventure games (the smallest text adventure,
>from my experience, occupied 3,583 bytes on a Commodore Vic-20)?
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Paul Allen Panks
>dun...@yahoo.com
AFAIK the text adventures for Vic-20 were put on a cartridge which
held some extra memory. At least Adventureland was like this.
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Adam Thornton
Harry <gad...@SPAMBLOCKhaha.demon.nl> wrote:
>>Anyways, 8K sounds about right for small to medium sized adventure games.
>>Has anyone even managed 2K adventure games (the smallest text adventure,
>>from my experience, occupied 3,583 bytes on a Commodore Vic-20)?
>held some extra memory. At least Adventureland was like this.
The Scott Adams games were generally 16K games. However, it should be
possible to do the interpreter in a couple hundred bytes of RAM, and use
ROM for all the strings.
I used Greg Troutman's _Dark Mage_ engine to do a 4K Atari 2600 text
adventure, using 128 bytes of RAM. I imagine that an Atari Scott Adams
terp ought to be doable, although I haven't sat down and looked at it.
You might need an additional 2K RAM bank though.
Adam
M Joonas Pihlaja
> I am curious if anyone has succeeded in writing in a full-blown text
> adventure (with advanced parser) in just under 8K of RAM?
There's a 4K adventure for x86 by John Metcalf in the ifarchive.
It's fairly small, has a simplish parser, but does pack quite a
lot of text into the game for its size. Don't know how much RAM
it uses, but I could find out.
Regards,
Joonas Pihlaja
Torquemada
Now there's a challenge and a half. Did you have any particular platform in
mind or would any platform do?
--
Torque
Fredrik Ramsberg
> > Has anyone even managed 2K adventure games...?
>
> Now there's a challenge and a half. Did you have any particular platform in
> mind or would any platform do?
I wrote a silly little adventure about Mickey Mouse in 1987. It's in
Swedish, for the C64. It has 40 locations and 9 objects, a two word
parser that recognises 9 different verbs. The "puzzles" can all be
solved by a combination of climbing, swimming, taking and dropping. It
occupies 2085 bytes. The original reason for writing something that
small was a teacher of mine who claimed that the source code of a
program should never exceed three screenfuls of text. Thinking he was
crazy, I still thought I had to try the challenge of writing a text
adventure that small.
I eventually found out he meant a procedure, not a program. But then
it was too late...
Here's the source code: http://geo.ramsberg.net/musse.html
/Fredrik
someone
On 29 Aug 2003 06:16:24 -0700, f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) posted:
could you redo it in english and in basic?
Gene Wirchenko
ISTR a ***very*** simple one in an interpreted BASIC that fit in
1K. It looked like an adventure, but was really a simple state
machine.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.
Fredrik Ramsberg
> On 29 Aug 2003 06:16:24 -0700, f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) posted:
>
> >"Torquemada" <torqu...@nospam.sigfpe.com> wrote in message news:<xav3b.1822$lC7...@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com>...
> >> > Has anyone even managed 2K adventure games...?
> >>
> >> Now there's a challenge and a half. Did you have any particular platform in
> >> mind or would any platform do?
> >
> >I wrote a silly little adventure about Mickey Mouse in 1987. It's in
> >Swedish, for the C64.
>
Actually, it was already in Basic. Now it's in English too:
http://geo.ramsberg.net/mickey_and_the_blot.html
/Fredrik
someone
Gene Wirchenko
There is something very skewed about having to download an
emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going to
pass for now.
Glenn P.,
> On 29 Aug 2003 06:16:24 -0700, f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) posted:
:> I wrote a silly little adventure about Mickey Mouse in 1987. It's in
:> Swedish, for the C64...
> Could you redo it in English and in BASIC?
I very much second that motion! :)
-- _____ %%%%% "Glenn P.," <C128...@FVI.Net> %%%%% _____
{~._.~} ------------------------------------------ {~._.~}
_( Y )_ "Uncle Glenn, your shoe's untied." _( Y )_
(:_~*~_:) "Well now, that's a nice try, Jay, (:_~*~_:)
(_)-(_) but my shoes use Velcro." (_)-(_)
========= ------------------------------------------ =========
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Glenn P.,
> There is something very skewed about having to download an
> emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going
> to pass for now.
If you had a true C64, a 1541 (or 1571) disk drive, and a D64 extractor,
you wouldn't need an Emulator, you could do it on he Real Thing. :)
Gene Wirchenko
>On 31-Aug-03 at 12:51am -0000, <ge...@mail.ocis.net> wrote:
>
> > There is something very skewed about having to download an
> > emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going
> > to pass for now.
>
>If you had a true C64, a 1541 (or 1571) disk drive, and a D64 extractor,
>you wouldn't need an Emulator, you could do it on he Real Thing. :)
I do not have them. I do have GWBASIC. Unfortunately, there are
some different semantics in the statements. That was after adding
spaces to cover the different tokenising.
Fredrik Ramsberg
> f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) wrote:
>
> >eri...@hotmail.com (someone) wrote in message news:<3f546d23...@news.singnet.com.sg>...
> >> On 29 Aug 2003 06:16:24 -0700, f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) posted:
> >> >Swedish, for the C64.
> >>
> >> could you redo it in english and in basic?
> >
> >Actually, it was already in Basic. Now it's in English too:
> >
> >http://geo.ramsberg.net/mickey_and_the_blot.html
>
> There is something very skewed about having to download an
> emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going to
> pass for now.
You're right in that it was too inaccessible. However, I've
found a freely available C64 emulator in Java, so this has
been fixed. There's a link to play it online from the Mickey
page now. It's still a 230KB download, but there's no
installation and nothing you need to learn to get it started.
The reason that the VICE emulator is so big is probably that
it also contains emulators for C128, Vic-20, and several
other Commodore machines. And it has an astonishing set of
features, as well as extremely high compatibility with all
sorts of weird programs.
/Fredrik
Fredrik Ramsberg
> "Glenn P.," <C128...@FVI.Net> wrote:
>
> >On 31-Aug-03 at 12:51am -0000, <ge...@mail.ocis.net> wrote:
> >
> > > There is something very skewed about having to download an
> > > emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going
> > > to pass for now.
> >
> >If you had a true C64, a 1541 (or 1571) disk drive, and a D64 extractor,
> >you wouldn't need an Emulator, you could do it on he Real Thing. :)
>
> I do not have them. I do have GWBASIC. Unfortunately, there are
> some different semantics in the statements. That was after adding
> spaces to cover the different tokenising.
Also, the game in question relies very much on the Petscii character
codes. It would take some work to convert it to a system using ASCII
or something like it.
/Fredrik
Gene Wirchenko
[snip]
>Also, the game in question relies very much on the Petscii character
>codes. It would take some work to convert it to a system using ASCII
>or something like it.
I do not think so. The worst was using "{left}" to erase a
character that had been displayed.
The problem I had had to do with what values are returned by
logical operations. In at least one place, this was combined with
bitwise operations. If I know what true and false are, I could
probably convert it.
Linards Ticmanis
> The problem I had had to do with what values are returned by
> logical operations. In at least one place, this was combined with
> bitwise operations. If I know what true and false are, I could
> probably convert it.
The Commodores returned -1 (minus one) on true and 0 on false. On
testing, 0 is considered false and anything else is considered true.
--
Linards Ticmanis
The Master said, "The business of laying on the colors follows the
preparation of the plain ground."
Fredrik Ramsberg
> f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >Also, the game in question relies very much on the Petscii character
> >codes. It would take some work to convert it to a system using ASCII
> >or something like it.
>
> I do not think so. The worst was using "{left}" to erase a
> character that had been displayed.
Yeah, that's a natural thing to do on a C64, but may be slightly messy
on other systems.
You still have to carefully convert the three strings that hold the
location property table. Since putting the listing on that page,
I've discovered at least one character that gets incorrectly translated
from Petscii to Ascii - @ shows up as a backquote. You should really
look at the program file in a hex editor to translate it, or possibly list it
in a C64 emulator with a Petscii and an Ascii table nearby.
> The problem I had had to do with what values are returned by
> logical operations. In at least one place, this was combined with
> bitwise operations. If I know what true and false are, I could
> probably convert it.
The C64 basic didn't make any difference between logical and bitwise
operators. To make the same operators work as both logical and bitwise
operators, there's really only one option: False has to be 0 and true has to
be -1 (binary 1111111111111111). And it is.
/Fredrik
Katzy
Gene Wirchenko wrote in message <3f5143d8...@news.ocis.net>...
>f...@mail.com (Fredrik Ramsberg) wrote:
<snip>
>>> >I wrote a silly little adventure about Mickey Mouse in 1987. It's in
>>> >Swedish, for the C64.
>>>
>>> could you redo it in english and in basic?
>>
>>Actually, it was already in Basic. Now it's in English too:
>>
>>http://geo.ramsberg.net/mickey_and_the_blot.html
>
> There is something very skewed about having to download an
>emulator package that is over 3 MB to run this thing. I am going to
>pass for now.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Gene Wirchenko
It works in CCS64 too, just about 300K zipped:
http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
Greetz, Katzy
Katzy
http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/
Greetz, Katzy
And now it is made to run on a PC with (Gw/Q) Basic.
Greetz, Katzy.
Fredrik Ramsberg
> And now it is made to run on a PC with (Gw/Q) Basic.
And where might we find this version?
/Fredrik
Katzy
Fredrik Ramsberg wrote in message ...
You'll find it in here:
http://www.nostalgia8.org/download/commodore/mickey/mickey_pc.zip
I am intending to add the commodore (d.64) version too and I wonder if you
can (and want of course) translate the other swedish adventures to english
...(?)
Greetz, Katzy