[Coco] How I "Ported" Planet of Death to Coco

[jimgerrie at ns.sympatico.ca]

   Steve,

   I don't work from binaries only text source (BASIC,JAVA,C, etc.)
   scavenged from the Net or magazines (if you know of any good prospects
   let me know).  In the case of POD, someone had ported the original game
   to C so it could be run on one of the old TI calculators (or something
   like that).  I came across it while researching POD.  It had all the
   objects, messages, locations, and responses nicely typed out in neat
   strings and a numeric table of the room motions (luckily in a pretty
   standard format of room numbers for N,S,E,W,U,D for every room). I just
   plucked these, and then plunk them into a pretty flexible BASIC
   two-word parser engine from Compute magazine (I think), called "Tower
   of Mystery "(which Neil Morrison of the Yahoo group sent me and which I
   have tweaked with a 32 character word wrap routine, so it fits
   everything neatly onto an MC-10/Coco screen). Then it was just reading
   and watching various walk-throughs to tweak the "Tower of Mystery
   engine to provide the right responses to all the verb object
   combinations needed.

   I forgot to mention, another ZX derived game of mine is FESQUEST (which
   is a homage to the Coco Fest Chicago events).  It is a rehash of a port
   to the MC-10 of "Pit with Monsters" by Jim Enness for either the ZX81
   or Spectrum (can't recall which), which I typed in from a Brit computer
   mag many years ago.

   If you look at my
   http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/Home/jgames.html

   programs marked with * are completely new programs.  Ones marked with +
   are either remakes (drawing inspiration from or possibly code as in the
   above case) or more straightforward ports of BASIC source modified to
   run on the MC-10 (and then later further modified to work in Color
   BASIC for the Coco and Dragon).