[Coco] How I "Ported" Planet of Death to Coco

[Bill Pierce]

I used the same adventure engine back in the early 80s to "attempt" to write a large adventure in BASIC. I eventually ran out of memory on my 16k Coco 2and abandoned the project.
I got the "Tower of Mystery" listing from:

"COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventure Games"

by Gary McGath and published in 1984. I think it was a collection of their articles so the "Tower of Mystery" was probably in "Compute!" magazine as well.

The info in that book was invaluable to me in learning BASIC programming as I had to convert the listing to be compatible with the Coco.
I have a scan of the book that could be upoloaded.


Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
 

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com


 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: jimgerrie <jimgerrie at ns.sympatico.ca>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Apr 14, 2015 10:31 am
Subject: [Coco] How I "Ported" Planet of Death to Coco


Steve,

   I don't work from binaries only text source (BASIC,JAVA,C, etc.)
  
scavenged from the Net or magazines (if you know of any good prospects
   let me
know).  In the case of POD, someone had ported the original game
   to C so it
could be run on one of the old TI calculators (or something
   like that).  I
came across it while researching POD.  It had all the
   objects, messages,
locations, and responses nicely typed out in neat
   strings and a numeric table
of the room motions (luckily in a pretty
   standard format of room numbers for
N,S,E,W,U,D for every room). I just
   plucked these, and then plunk them into a
pretty flexible BASIC
   two-word parser engine from Compute magazine (I think),
called "Tower
   of Mystery "(which Neil Morrison of the Yahoo group sent me and
which I
   have tweaked with a 32 character word wrap routine, so it fits
  
everything neatly onto an MC-10/Coco screen). Then it was just reading
   and
watching various walk-throughs to tweak the "Tower of Mystery
   engine to
provide the right responses to all the verb object
   combinations needed.

   I
forgot to mention, another ZX derived game of mine is FESQUEST (which
   is a
homage to the Coco Fest Chicago events).  It is a rehash of a port
   to the
MC-10 of "Pit with Monsters" by Jim Enness for either the ZX81
   or Spectrum
(can't recall which), which I typed in from a Brit computer
   mag many years
ago.

   If you look at my
   http://faculty.cbu.ca/jgerrie/Home/jgames.html

  
programs marked with * are completely new programs.  Ones marked with +
   are
either remakes (drawing inspiration from or possibly code as in the
   above
case) or more straightforward ports of BASIC source modified to
   run on the
MC-10 (and then later further modified to work in Color
   BASIC for the Coco
and Dragon).

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