[Coco] [!! SPAM] Re: Anyone still play text adventure games?

[John Kent]

Hi Steve,

My brother & I bought a copy of Black Sanctum too for Flex. The problem 
with a lot of the games was that people would cheat by dumping the 
binary. We bought the Colossal Cave adventure for the 6800 running 
Flex2. Because of the memory map of Flex2 and the size of the adventure 
game it actually overwrote sections of operating system so you had to 
reboot Flex2 after playing the game. The Flex9 version didn't have that 
problem because there was more continuous memory.

My bother started to write adventure compilers. I wrote a Huffman 
(Huff?) coding algorithm for the text strings. That involved do a 
character count of all the text and generating a coding table that was 
unique to the adventure game. The length of the character code was 
inversely proportional to frequency of the character. English text 
though I think is pretty standard in the frequency of characters. We 
used a serial bit stream reader to read the text strings and convert 
them back to ASCII codes. Not only did this optimize the use of memory, 
it also made it difficult for people to cheat and look at the text 
strings embedded in the program. Huffman (Huff?) or entropy encoding is 
used in MPEG video streams I believe.

We started off with the Scott Adams adventure interpreter but ended up 
with a language syntax  that was almost like written English. The code 
was moved to the IBM PC and the working compiler got lost I think. We 
were told that most of the game developers at the time were writing 
their games in C. There was something at the time called Quill for 
writing adventure games. I think it might have been cassette based.

John.

On 25/05/2011 1:33 PM, Steve Ostrom wrote:
> A group of us at work bought one of the first Cocos available in the 
> Minneapolis area.  We also purchased the Black Sanctum text adventure 
> when that was available, and played the adventure during every lunch 
> break for weeks.  I so fell in love with Black Sanctum that I decided 
> to write my own adventure.  Our small work group then played my 
> adventure and everyone seemed to like it, and suggested I try to sell 
> it.  I sent it away to Tom Mix and to Dennis Lewandowski of DSL 
> Computer Products, and both took it and sold it for about a year.  
> Graphic adventures were just then beginning to be popular, so my text 
> adventure never really earned a lot of royalty money. Tom Mix actually 
> scolded me for getting rid of a few areas in the adventure by making 
> it fit into a 16K Coco, but I thought that would increase it's selling 
> market.   Oh, well.  I'll never make money in Marketing.  The 
> adventure is called Shipwrek, and was eventually sold to T&D for one 
> of their issues.
>
> That relationship with Tom Mix enabled me to start some assembly 
> programming.  I was playing the game Qix in the arcades, and asked Tom 
> if he was developing a similar game for the Coco.  He said no, but 
> would love to have it.  He asked if I could write it.  I knew nothing 
> of assembly language programming at that time, and I learned a lot 
> about 6809 assembly during that exercise.  Tom kept encouraging me, 
> and I kept sending him my updates on a weekly basis.  He was telling 
> me that the author of his Donkey Kong game was pulling down huge 
> royalties every month.  Then my first child was born and the 
> development slowed.  I finally told Tom that I couldn't meet his 
> deadlines.  He asked if it would be OK to give my code to another 
> developer who wanted to try that same game, and I said of course.  
> Needless to say, about 3 months later, Tom was selling a very good 
> version of Qix. Somewhere, the author did credit me with having 
> helped, but his final product was so much better than mine that I had 
> little to do with it.  I was able to make a good spinning Qix, and 
> developed the game play and the scoring.  I never did finish any sound 
> effects or sparks.
>
> After that attempt, I just did assembly language programming on some 
> fun stuff.  Mark and Boisy have a BASIC program that wll back up a 
> full 256 drive hard drive, and I wrote that same program in machine 
> language, which runs about twice as fast.  That was disappointing to 
> me, but I think the speed of the drives is the limiting factor, not 
> the programming.  My ML version of that program was actually written 
> and hand assembled on paper only while at my family's lake cabin one 
> summer.  Hand coding and hand assembly is really cool if you really 
> want to learn exactly what your code is doing.  I never did use an 
> assembler on that code, but just dumped the ML code into DATA 
> statements.  I still use that ML code to back up all my software from 
> one HD to another.
>
> -- Steve --
>

-- 
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