[Coco] Lansford Mansion (and other graphic adventures)

[Robert Gault]

Phil wrote:
> Hi, all --
> 
> My girlfriend and I have taken to playing some of the graphic adventure 
> games released on L. Curtis Boyle's excellent site.  We've been having a 
> great time and, generally speaking, doing rather well at it.  It's been 
> a real treat to go back and play the games I could only read about in 
> Rainbow as a child, like the excellent Caladuril: Flame of Light.
> 
> Lansford Mansion, however, has got us completely stuck.  There are 
> several puzzles we can't seem to get past, there's nothing about the 
> game on the Internet, and attempts at manually inspecting the binary 
> have proven fruitless.  I tried to contact one of the game's authors, 
> but had no luck.  Does anyone have a walkthrough for the game, or 
> remember it well enough to help?  Was there ever anything in Rainbow?
> 
> Also, while I'm at it:
> 
> The authors of the Mark Data games (Bob Withers and Stephen O'Dea) were 
> kind enough to make his stuff available on Bob's old website, 
> ruffboy.com.  Unfortunately, it seems the site has been down for a 
> while.  I've found sources for most of the games, but haven't been able 
> to track down Black Sanctum or Sea Search.  I tried retrieving the .bin 
> files from Archive.org, but when I try to run them, they fail with an 
> ?IE error.  Does anyone have any suggestions for where I might get 
> working DSK or BIN images of the games in question?  (I do have a 
> text-only copy of Black Sanctum but these games are a lot more fun with 
> the graphics.)
> 
> For the record, though it's in storage at my parents' house, I still own 
> the real hardware!  I miss the silent beauty of my Cocos (2 and 3), but 
> am glad that people are still keeping a very special computing platform 
> alive.
> 
> Thanks,
> Phil
> 
> (first post to the list, so please be kind...!)
> 
> -- 

Hi Phil,

  Hope you enjoy the list and all of the Coco knowledge available here.

  The disappearance of Bob Withers' site is a great loss to the Coco 
community. The archive.org copy is an incomplete one (source code 
missing) and clearly there are corrupted files.
  Black Sanctum is a case in point of a corrupted Coco file. It is one 
byte short and should end with a $00 not $1C as it does. That's why you 
have the IE error.

  If you have the tools to correct the file by adding the missing byte, 
it will run. If you don't have the tools, I can e-mail you the corrected 
file.

  Keep in mind that the file on the site, while it loads from a disk, 
makes saves to tape. I might be able to supply a modified version that 
makes saves to disk. I have to check my records.

  I did not look at Sea Search and don't know if it is missing the end 
of the file as well.