adamantyr

Well, this never turned up... to be honest, even finding physical copies of the game is hard. So I've extracted all the maps (worlds, towns and dungeons) and created a small guide myself, should anyone want to try and complete the game. (The CRPG Addict is likely not going to pick it back up, the time investment is too much and he's got a huge backlog of games.) http://crpg.adamantyr.com/misc/Seventh-Link-Hint-Guide.zip

Yeah, who knows if it was even printed? The catalog may have been made using a mock-up, and then Christmas 1983 came along and they just cancelled everything. IF manuals had been printed, they probably ended up in the dumpster. If any cartridges had been put out with the manuals, I'm pretty sure one would have turned up in a collection after 37 years.

Awesome! Damn I want that manual... It does look like the same artist did the cover for Hunt the Wumpus. No physical copies of the manual have ever been seen though, so I presume the game was never released with it.

Could it have been the Desktop Publisher cartridge from Databiotics? I seem to recall it had a 32-column word processor that may have been WYSIWYG.

Awesome, I'll definitely come by!

Ahem... See my upcoming CRPG. As for SAMS in an Extended BASIC environment, the real challenge is to create the memory architecture. Paged memory requires you to think in a more modular way at the assembly level, so masking that from view or consideration in XB is a major chunk of work.

There is a different stronger sound for critical hits. Look and listen when they strike and there's three "strike" patterns instead of just one. You'd never hear that sensational victory tune. A mocking tune for escape is possible though. I'd need a good candidate for the music though. I've been mining obscure classical music (I.E. public domain) for a lot of my material. I am trying to avoid using music from other TI games, the sole exception was the Store jingle from ToD. As for your other combat suggestions, remember you've only seen a portion of the special attacks in the game up to now. Several of your suggestions wouldn't work in the current architecture. Fear IS in the game though, which makes your PC's run away and is very debilitating. Monster A.I. may get some more tweaks, particularly with pathfinding, but I've been careful to avoid "threat tracking" because THAT could easily make the game too difficult. If a PC throws a fireball and suddenly every single monster in the game targets him, he'd be dead in very short order.

Almost?! Early on in design I decided no background music. Like any vintage CRPG of the era, put something on your stereo to listen to as you play. It will certainly sound better than anything the chip produces. Changing and updating sounds and maybe adding variety would be a polishing phase step later. I always did like how Alpiner had different tunes for reaching the top, so I'll consider that.

Also, part 4! In which I learn I need to scale back some encounters and enemies...

Characters who end combat disabled only get 1/2 experience. Characters who flee a combat but the rest of the party wins get no experience. The game does not use speech synthesis. I didn't really have any place it could be utilized. I got a future project that will use it though.

I bought the game back in the day, and copied the disks over awhile back. I don't know if they will work any better, but here they are. Adamantyr MEXUFO1.DSK MEXUFO2.DSK

The mapping was matching my own expectations, page 0 is >00000, page 16 is >10000, page 40 is >28000, etc.

And he was on a roll, so part 3:

Beta testing video part 2!

Merry Christmas everyone! Unfortunately, I didn't get the game done by Christmas like I wanted... rest assured though it's going through extensive testing to ensure it's playable and winnable! Meanwhile, you can enjoy this video of one of the testers playing the game from the start and going through the first major quests:

Given I requested the feature, I'll answer that. It's actually VERY useful because at many points in my CRPG, I would like to see the data that's in a page that is not accessible at the point in code where I'm at. I have one bug I need to hunt down where after playing awhile, some of the name data got corrupted and I have no idea what process overwrote that area of memory. This will definitely help find it.

Ah that was it, I got #14 now. AMS viewer works perfectly!

Yep, every time I download it, it's not version 14. And there's no AMS on the debug window.

What link did you download it from?

I don't think you got the new version up? About still shows v399.013 from a freshly downloaded copy.

At this time, I have no plans to make the CRPG function with anything other than the SAMS architecture. I had a similar question not long ago, if the Geneve 9640 could natively run it without SAMS. The issue is the same in both cases; 8K pages are too large for the job. There are times I have two 4k pages of consecutive data so that an overlap just spills over into the 2nd page. Also, the game's coding architecture is not designed to clearly delineate ROM from RAM, I occasionally over-write statics here and there, I even had self-writing code at one point.

I have a sample assembly program which is reproducing the speech from Gauntlet. I've tried digitizing my own voice a few times, but I wasn't happy with the results. (You need a good microphone, and probably a good voice too. I can't stand mine.)

The same question could be asked, I suppose, of any engineer who worked on the computers of that era. Since they had a limited number of colors possible, it's really an artistic and marketing choice over anything else. Whoever picked colors on the TI clearly wanted more yellows and greens than was standard on most systems. Honestly, one yellow and two greens would have been fine. Light Yellow and Medium Green are two of the least useful shades. (Medium Red is also kind of meh.) Cyan feels like it was chosen specifically as the "baseline" background color for applications. It's so significantly brighter than the other two blues that they don't blend very well.

Is there a list of what was in the collection?

I'm so sorry to hear this. I will put a tribute to him in my CRPG.