[Coco] Anyone still play text adventure games?

[Steve Ostrom]

A group of us at work bought one of the first Cocos available in the 
Minneapolis area.  We also purchased the Black Sanctum text adventure when 
that was available, and played the adventure during every lunch break for 
weeks.  I so fell in love with Black Sanctum that I decided to write my own 
adventure.  Our small work group then played my adventure and everyone 
seemed to like it, and suggested I try to sell it.  I sent it away to Tom 
Mix and to Dennis Lewandowski of DSL Computer Products, and both took it and 
sold it for about a year.  Graphic adventures were just then beginning to be 
popular, so my text adventure never really earned a lot of royalty money. 
Tom Mix actually scolded me for getting rid of a few areas in the adventure 
by making it fit into a 16K Coco, but I thought that would increase it's 
selling market.   Oh, well.  I'll never make money in Marketing.  The 
adventure is called Shipwrek, and was eventually sold to T&D for one of 
their issues.

That relationship with Tom Mix enabled me to start some assembly 
programming.  I was playing the game Qix in the arcades, and asked Tom if he 
was developing a similar game for the Coco.  He said no, but would love to 
have it.  He asked if I could write it.  I knew nothing of assembly language 
programming at that time, and I learned a lot about 6809 assembly during 
that exercise.  Tom kept encouraging me, and I kept sending him my updates 
on a weekly basis.  He was telling me that the author of his Donkey Kong 
game was pulling down huge royalties every month.  Then my first child was 
born and the development slowed.  I finally told Tom that I couldn't meet 
his deadlines.  He asked if it would be OK to give my code to another 
developer who wanted to try that same game, and I said of course.  Needless 
to say, about 3 months later, Tom was selling a very good version of Qix. 
Somewhere, the author did credit me with having helped, but his final 
product was so much better than mine that I had little to do with it.  I was 
able to make a good spinning Qix, and developed the game play and the 
scoring.  I never did finish any sound effects or sparks.

After that attempt, I just did assembly language programming on some fun 
stuff.  Mark and Boisy have a BASIC program that wll back up a full 256 
drive hard drive, and I wrote that same program in machine language, which 
runs about twice as fast.  That was disappointing to me, but I think the 
speed of the drives is the limiting factor, not the programming.  My ML 
version of that program was actually written and hand assembled on paper 
only while at my family's lake cabin one summer.  Hand coding and hand 
assembly is really cool if you really want to learn exactly what your code 
is doing.  I never did use an assembler on that code, but just dumped the ML 
code into DATA statements.  I still use that ML code to back up all my 
software from one HD to another.

-- Steve --



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Banerjee" <spam_proof at verizon.net>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2011 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Anyone still play text adventure games?


>
> Once in a blue moon I'll play one -- mostly for nostalgia.  I too  liked 
> "Bedlam."  There were two John Olson games I translated to Coco  BASIC 
> decades ago -- "Gym Adventure" and "Ship Adventure."   I also  put out a 
> version of "Quest" (can't remember who wrote it) for the  Coco.  It wasn't 
> a true text adventure -- sort of more of a text based  video game, and I 
> had to make a few modifications because of that  fancy 64 column screen 
> the Model I/III used...
>                                        - Aaron
>
>
> On May 22, 2011, at 7:01 PM, Steve Batson wrote:
>
>> Just wondering if anyone still plays text adventures on the CoCo or  any
>> other computer for that matter. I used to love Bedlam. Years back, I  was
>> considering writing my own Text Adventure, but never got around to  it. 
>> With
>> all the cool graphics and sounds in games out there, think anyone  would
>> even have an interest in text adventure games anymore?
>>
>>
>> --
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>
>
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