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  • 2 years later...

SWEET!! I actually wanted to get IntvBasic going just to finally make this thread possible (since Eliza program listing are in various basic programming books). Didn't do it, but that was the first application of that program I thought of remembering this thread.

  • 5 months later...

I'm curious how Chatterbot / ELIZA is really doable in IntyBASIC, as the other BASIC versions require string handling, and that's not a part of IntyBASIC. Nor is text input.

 

I'm doing text input in IntyBASIC :) Handling shouldn't be that out of the question, although memory constraints could become an issue.

 

I'm doing text input in IntyBASIC :) Handling shouldn't be that out of the question, although memory constraints could become an issue.

 

Are you using the ECS keyboard? You must have some inline ASM then. :-)

 

It's entirely possible to write all the string handling that ELIZA requires as array operations and loops, although it won't be terribly pleasant.

 

Actually, looking at one of the publicly available ELIZA.BAS programs, if you understand how strings work, it may actually be more straightforward to write the string manipulation with manual loops than to use the operators BASIC gives you. Hmmm... But, you'll have to understand what each of the loops in the original are doing to best rewrite them.

 

The other piece you'll need is having a nice abstraction for the display so you can scroll it. PRINT doesn't handle that for you. SCROLL will; however, you will still want an abstraction wrapping that, especially if you want to word-wrap the output.

Edited by intvnut

 

We had text input long before you kids and your fancy keyboards :P

 

I didn't say it was EFFICIENT text input.

 

 

Ok then. I was wondering if that's what you were doing. :-) I believe Valter intended Chatterbot to be an ECS title though, leveraging the ECS keyboard rather than destroying the remaining hand controllers in existence. ;-)

Ive never played a text based video game. It would be interesting.

 

Im wondering how a text based "choose your own adventure" type game would work?

 

I tried inputting a "Choose Your Own Adventure " book into my Commodore Vic20 back in the day. With 3.5K of available RAM, I ran out of space long before getting much of the book in. It was a lot of fun though, for the few pages and few decision points that I managed to code in.

 

Given a half-decent text encoding scheme, I'm pretty sure I could fit one of those into a modern Intellivision cartridge. They're about 150 pages long, but with pretty sparse word counts.

 

I tried inputting a "Choose Your Own Adventure " book into my Commodore Vic20 back in the day. With 3.5K of available RAM, I ran out of space long before getting much of the book in. It was a lot of fun though, for the few pages and few decision points that I managed to code in.

 

Given a half-decent text encoding scheme, I'm pretty sure I could fit one of those into a modern Intellivision cartridge. They're about 150 pages long, but with pretty sparse word counts.

 

Plain text can take a surprising amount of space. 150 pages at 200 characters a page (roughly a screenful) would weigh in at about 30K bytes as raw text. Its easy to see why Zork and other text adventure games used various compression schemes (dictionary, packed letters, etc.) to put these games on a diet.

 

Colossal Cave takes up 128K bytes just for its database—that's not counting the engine. 95% of that is text, I'm pretty sure. To put it into perspective: That's nearly one whole side of an Apple ][ floppy.

Edited by intvnut
  • 3 weeks later...

 

 

OT - Joe, were you an Apple ][ guy "back in the day"?

 

 

 

Plain text can take a surprising amount of space. 150 pages at 200 characters a page (roughly a screenful) would weigh in at about 30K bytes as raw text. Its easy to see why Zork and other text adventure games used various compression schemes (dictionary, packed letters, etc.) to put these games on a diet.

 

Colossal Cave takes up 128K bytes just for its databasethat's not counting the engine. 95% of that is text, I'm pretty sure. To put it into perspective: That's nearly one whole side of an Apple ][ floppy.

OT - Joe, were you an Apple ][ guy "back in the day"?

 

I was a "little bit of everything" guy BitD. I owned a TI-99/4A, but spent considerable amount of time on the various Apple ][s at school and the public library. (They actually had an Apple /// with an Apple ][+ emulator card.) I also spent time on Commodore PETs in middle school, and IBM PC clones when I had the chance. I even borrowed a Tandy 1000 for awhile while in high school.

 

So, I had a pretty broad 8-bit-era education. :-)

 

The Apple ][ family is probably the one I spent the most time dissecting and writing assembly code for, though.

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