The Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure game, running on PE6502!
Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2017 11:39 amA previously unstated goal of mine for the PE6502 computer: to be able to load and run Zork 1. I'm not sure, but I think with the CFFA1 compact flash/mass storage add-on, it is possible (we're still working on adapting this product to the PE6502.) In the mean time, I've found a worthy substitute: The Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure, by Jeff Tranter. I've mentioned Jeff Tranter here before- he's got an awesome YouTube channel, and blog- you should check both out!
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/jefftranter
Blog: http://jefftranter.blogspot.com/2012/03/adventure-game-for-replica-1-available.html
Why am I so nostalgic for text adventure games? In the early 1980's, my family got our first computer, a Commodore 64. We started out very small; we used the family television set, and initially had just the "C2N Datasette" tape drive, and a couple of cartridges. The first games I remember playing on this computer were text adventures. We enjoyed these so much, I still remember the name of the tape/package today, "Adventure Pack II". I even found online the games to play on an emulator, and also some original ad text:
ADVENTURE PACK II (3 programs) $19.95
AFRICAN ADVENTURE As the sole survivor of a plane crash,
you must find your way out of the dark continent.
HOSPITAL ADVENTURE You are a spy whose mission is to com-
plete the bungled assassination attempt on the evil dictator,
who is recuperating in the hospital under heavy guard.
BOMB THREAT Get back to town to warn the authorities of
the bomb planted by the terrorists who left you prisoner at
their hideout.
These are the games I remember! Years later (while in college) I re-discovered text adventures- by now already considered vintage. The first of these games I found was "Dungeon", ported from actual mainframe code to run on my Mac Classic I had at the time! This later lead to another vintage re-discovery of what many consider the predecessor of Dungeon, "Adventure", also a mainframe port. The creators of Dungeon later went on to form the company Infocom, through which they re-released Dungeon broken into three parts (so it would fit on home computers of the era.) This is the classic/famous series Zork I/II/III. Infocom later released other hit games, such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, and many more.
At any rate, back to the topic at hand! Jeff Tranter recently wrote a text adventure that is entirely accurate to the style of these text games from yesteryear. He coded it in C, and it is optimized to run on a Replica 1 or an Apple 1 6502 computer- perfect for our needs! I've compiled the program as downloaded from Jeff's GitHub page (you can too- see the link to his blog above for more info.) I used the Linux VM and CC65/CA65 toolchain I described in another post here, and it compiled without issue. To load the game, start out with your PE6502 in the machine code monitor- as it is when you first power-on. Rather than use "Send File" in TeraTerm, I've discovered it better to open the file adventure.mon as a text file in Wordpad, then copy all (using CTRL-A, then CTRL-C), and paste it into the PE6502-connected TeraTerm window. It will take a while- but it is worth it!!! The game should auto-start, but if it does not, enter from the monitor prompt 280R to start it.
In case you don't want to compile it yourself, I've attached here the compiled file. It really is a fun game, and I was happy to see Jeff coded it to support lowercase characters- a nice touch! I hope you enjoy this as much as I have!
http://putnamelectronics.com/adventure.mon
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/jefftranter
Blog: http://jefftranter.blogspot.com/2012/03/adventure-game-for-replica-1-available.html
Why am I so nostalgic for text adventure games? In the early 1980's, my family got our first computer, a Commodore 64. We started out very small; we used the family television set, and initially had just the "C2N Datasette" tape drive, and a couple of cartridges. The first games I remember playing on this computer were text adventures. We enjoyed these so much, I still remember the name of the tape/package today, "Adventure Pack II". I even found online the games to play on an emulator, and also some original ad text:
ADVENTURE PACK II (3 programs) $19.95
AFRICAN ADVENTURE As the sole survivor of a plane crash,
you must find your way out of the dark continent.
HOSPITAL ADVENTURE You are a spy whose mission is to com-
plete the bungled assassination attempt on the evil dictator,
who is recuperating in the hospital under heavy guard.
BOMB THREAT Get back to town to warn the authorities of
the bomb planted by the terrorists who left you prisoner at
their hideout.
These are the games I remember! Years later (while in college) I re-discovered text adventures- by now already considered vintage. The first of these games I found was "Dungeon", ported from actual mainframe code to run on my Mac Classic I had at the time! This later lead to another vintage re-discovery of what many consider the predecessor of Dungeon, "Adventure", also a mainframe port. The creators of Dungeon later went on to form the company Infocom, through which they re-released Dungeon broken into three parts (so it would fit on home computers of the era.) This is the classic/famous series Zork I/II/III. Infocom later released other hit games, such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, and many more.
At any rate, back to the topic at hand! Jeff Tranter recently wrote a text adventure that is entirely accurate to the style of these text games from yesteryear. He coded it in C, and it is optimized to run on a Replica 1 or an Apple 1 6502 computer- perfect for our needs! I've compiled the program as downloaded from Jeff's GitHub page (you can too- see the link to his blog above for more info.) I used the Linux VM and CC65/CA65 toolchain I described in another post here, and it compiled without issue. To load the game, start out with your PE6502 in the machine code monitor- as it is when you first power-on. Rather than use "Send File" in TeraTerm, I've discovered it better to open the file adventure.mon as a text file in Wordpad, then copy all (using CTRL-A, then CTRL-C), and paste it into the PE6502-connected TeraTerm window. It will take a while- but it is worth it!!! The game should auto-start, but if it does not, enter from the monitor prompt 280R to start it.
In case you don't want to compile it yourself, I've attached here the compiled file. It really is a fun game, and I was happy to see Jeff coded it to support lowercase characters- a nice touch! I hope you enjoy this as much as I have!
http://putnamelectronics.com/adventure.mon