CAVE game by David I. Bell

[David Meyer]

twenex.org has a game CAVE - Multiplayer Dungeon Game which will start but is broken (most of the commands documented in the on-line help are unrecognized) apparently because its configuration file CAVE.DAT is missing.

We do have the Macro Assembler source file, CAVE.MAC, which begins:

<code>
TITLE CAVE ANOTHER GAME TO EXPLORE DUNGEONS
SUBTTL COMMENTS/DAVID I. BELL/DZN
</code>

Does anyone know anything about this game, especially where we could get a sample CAVE.DAT?

[Lars Brinkhoff]

David Meyer <papa...@gmail.com> writes:
> SUBTTL COMMENTS/DAVID I. BELL/DZN

I wonder if this is the same person?

http://members.tip.net.au/~dbell/

[David Meyer]

On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 8:01:29 PM UTC+9, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> http://members.tip.net.au/~dbell/

I will try sending him an e-mail.

[gah4]

I suspect it is completely unrelated, but it is reminding me of it, anyway.

In about 1977, I translated a BASIC program called PCAVES to Fortran-10.

I don't think I would have called it a dungeon game, but you move around in
the cave, read what is on the walls, write new things on the walls, and
(once per session) dig a new room.

I uses a direct access file to keep track of the caves, and needs record locking
so that updates are consistent. As I didn't know how, and Fortran-10 didn't
supply it, someone wrote me Macro-10 subroutines to lock and unlock
file records. I believe that it uses 128 word records for each room.
This was not long after FILDAE which allowed files to be only accessed
by specific programs.

If someone wants to remind me how to do record locking, I wouldn't mind.
I believe that they were about three line Macro-10 subroutines.