Adventure international for the BEEB

Games for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, Apple ][ and the rest of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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leenew
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 11:14 pm

Adventure international for the BEEB

#1 Post by leenew » Thu Jul 21, 2016 8:39 pm

Hi there,
I am looking for an original cassette, or a UEF from an original cassette of ADVENTURE 7 - Mystery fun house, and ADVENTURE 8 - Pyramid of doom for the BBC Micro.
I have only recently discovered that there were 2 different interpreters used for the BBC versions.
The way it worked was that Scott Adams would produce an adventure in database form, and an interpreter for each machine was written to play it on that particular machine.
The beeb was lucky - or unlucky - it got 2 versions!
If you load some versions, you will see credit going to Brian Howarth for the game.
Others credit Mak Jukic.

I have Adventures 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,and 15 (14 wasn't released for the beeb)
From these, only 7 and 8 are Jukic versions.
The Brian Howarth versions look more pleasing to the eye, and seem to be less buggy.
To see what I mean, you can compare Pyramid of Doom from the STH 143 disk collection here: http://www.stairwaytohell.com/bbc/sthco ... AS1_r1.zip
to the version on the new BBC micro website (plug plug plug!!), here: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1687
Try
INV
GET LIQUID
INV

or

E
GET STONE

to see differences
Thanks in advance...

Lee

dave
Posts: 606
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#2 Post by dave » Thu Jul 21, 2016 11:11 pm

I have the originals of both of those (for the Electron) using the Howarth engine. I'm hoping they still work as they're 25 years old now!

There's actually a third engine: I wrote a mostly complete engine for the BBC Master (it was meant to be for the BBC B, but I never finished it) back in 2010 - 2011. This one has the advantage that it does some graphics (for the Mysterious Adventures series, not for the SACA ones). The details etc are at Retro Software.

leenew
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 11:14 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#3 Post by leenew » Sun Jul 31, 2016 12:48 am

Hi Dave,
I may hopefully be getting original beeb versions from the computing history museum next month... fingers crossed!
On a slightly different subject... you may just be the man to explain how easy/hard it would be to get adventure 14 Return to pirate island working on the beeb.
In my mind it is a cut and paste job but I guess it won't be that easy!
Lee

dave
Posts: 606
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#4 Post by dave » Thu Aug 04, 2016 10:52 pm

I was looking for my copies of the adventures when I remembered that I gave the physical tapes to Arcadian, so no good from me there.

In terms of Return to Pirates Island. A quick search shows me that I have the SACA database of it, which means that I can port it as soon as I remind myself how I compiled everything last time (it was 3 years ago).

I'll have a look tomorrow.

leenew
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 11:14 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#5 Post by leenew » Thu Aug 04, 2016 11:43 pm

Aah cool!
Lee.

dave
Posts: 606
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#6 Post by dave » Fri Aug 05, 2016 11:47 am

I thought it would be easy and it's taken a while to remind myself of what I did between 3 and 6 years ago an came up against a design decision that I made back in 2010. (To do with representing the number of actions and this is the first game I've seen other than Seas of Blood with more than 255 actions)

Translation: it'll require some recoding on my side to get it working and I'm about to go away on holiday so it'll have to wait 'til I've got time to recode it.

dave
Posts: 606
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Adventure international for the BEEB

#7 Post by dave » Fri Aug 05, 2016 5:50 pm

Gah, me and my brain. Yes, I fixed it. It's a bit buggy as there are some differences in how Scott Adams and Brian Howarth wrote their games (Scott builds messages up from bits, Brian writes them as whole sentences) and as I wrote this engine for the Brian Howarth engine some of the message formatting is a bit off.

But here is Return to Pirate's Island as a beta. To run, load the .ssd and type the following into your Beeb emulator (only tested on Master 128 mode, but should work on any E00 DFS):

*load retpir
*engine

I'll get it working better once I'm back from holiday. (which'll give a chance for bugs to be discovered)
Attachments
out.zip
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