[Coco] BASIC program contest

[Robert Gault]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> I am echoing this message from another mailing list I am on which 
> actually has nothing to do with the CoCo or BASIC programming, but one 
> particular user is into writing Text Adventure games and shares some of 
> his news occasionally.
> 
> I thought it would be interesting to see if one of our own CoCo BASIC 
> experts here could show him up on this contest.
> 
> 
> 
>> "The 1st Annual 1 to 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition"
>>
>> http://panks.freeshell.org/advcomp.html
>>
>> Is it possible to write a text adventure in under 2K of RAM? Some
>> people have tried, and some have succeeded.
>>
>> I would like to officially announce the formation of The 1st Annual 1
>> to 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition. I will be accepting BASIC,
>> C/C++, Fortran and Assembly language submissions for 1 to 2K text
>> adventures written for the following computing platforms: Commodore
>> 64/128/+4/Vic-20/PET, TI 99/4A, IBM PC/PCJr, Atari 400/800, Apple
>> II/IIe, Sinclair, TRS-80, Color Computer, Acorn, Tomy Tutor, Bally
>> Astrocade, Linux, Mac and Windows/DOS.
>>
>> Please submit your 1 to 2K adventure games to me, source code format
>> only. The competition officially begins on June 28, 2004, and runs
>> through September 29, 2004. I will post all submissions, regardless
>> of when they were submitted, and then review them and post grades on
>> this page on October 7th. Good luck! =)
> 
> 
> 
> ----------
> Roger Taylor
> 
> 
> 
> 

I'm not clear on what this guy wants. Must the entire adventure both 
program and text messages fit into 2k of space, or only the program with 
message data on disk? If it is the latter, then the contest could be 
based on the best driver. If the former, it probably is based on the 
best adventure plot which has nothing to do with programming.

If the 2k is so important, why would anyone accept a language of lower 
order than BASIC? That just increases the size of the package with no 
gain in power (at least for text adventures). Some of the mentioned 
computers have BASIC in ROM as the native language while others don't. 
If a language were used that is not in the ROMs, does the language 
itself count as part of the 2k?