+DZ-Jay Posted September 6, 2012 Share Posted September 6, 2012 Will Colossal Cave require some rare component like a keyboard? Will we need to duct tape two controllers together to make a keypad? Will it use a joystick friendly interface like Kings Quest for the Sega Master System? Yes, it is specifically an ECS game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted September 6, 2012 Share Posted September 6, 2012 I can tell you right now it will not require the exceptionally rare Keyboard Component. The current version works with the ECS. I have some plans for making it accessible to all Intellivision owners, though, that I'll discuss once I have everything working. Don't worry, I think most folks will like what I have in mind. :-) Heh, should we practice our texting? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Rev Posted January 24, 2013 Author Share Posted January 24, 2013 Is anyone going to finish any of these games ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted January 25, 2013 Share Posted January 25, 2013 Yes. I haven't been able to get back to it yet, working in the CvW bespoke Special Edition, but that's done. I'll probably continue on Colossal Cave next week. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Rev Posted January 25, 2013 Author Share Posted January 25, 2013 Cool, dz, ive never played a text adventure game before, i was looking forward to the first one being on intv! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 DZ, are you porting a Z-Machine emulator to Intellivision for Colossal Cave? If so, would there be a possibility of a port of Zork I, since it it is available freely now? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 DZ, are you porting a Z-Machine emulator to Intellivision for Colossal Cave? If so, would there be a possibility of a port of Zork I, since it it is available freely now? I ported one of the original Adventure engines to the Intellivision, not the Infocom Z-Machine. Most of the work remaining is just polish and UI work. The actual Colossal Cave runs just fine currently. And what do you mean that Zork I is freely available now? The original copyright likely won't expire in our lifetimes. Did Infocom make a source release under a free or open license? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 The Colossal Cave does not use the Infocom's Z-Machine, it uses its very own virtual machine. I guess in theory the Z-Machine could be ported to the CP-1610. By the way, Joe is the one who ported the adventure VM to the Intellivision, not I. I'm just supplying the P-Machinery game engine wrapper so that we could add graphics and music easily and turn it into an "Intellivision" version, rather than a direct port. -dZ. P.S. Is it really Zork I that is freely available? I thought it was the version created at MIT prior to Infocom's formation, which means it's lacking the polish and depth of the published game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 I ported one of the original Adventure engines to the Intellivision, not the Infocom Z-Machine. Most of the work remaining is just polish and UI work. The actual Colossal Cave runs just fine currently. And what do you mean that Zork I is freely available now? The original copyright likely won't expire in our lifetimes. Did Infocom make a source release under a free or open license? That's what I thought. The freely available version is the first run they did while at MIT, not the final published game. It still has many elements, but it's smaller and less polished (and buggy). -dZ. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 Ah! I spoke too soon. The game is available for free, but not open source. It's free to download and play; no rights have been surrendered. The mainframe version of Zork from MIT is open source. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted January 30, 2013 Share Posted January 30, 2013 Ah! I spoke too soon. The game is available for free, but not open source. It's free to download and play; no rights have been surrendered. The mainframe version of Zork from MIT is open source. The one from the page referenced was the one I was referring to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Rick Reynolds Posted February 23, 2013 Share Posted February 23, 2013 Holy cow, I just found this thread! I'm a big text adventure (Interactive Fiction) fan. The idea of porting the Z-machine to the INTV is interesting, but I wonder if it is possible (?). Has anyone looked seriously at what that would entail? Is there enough space on an INTV for the Z-machine and a game? I know some of Infocom's games were ported to the TI-99, so that's one estimate of how small they could get. If that's even possible, I'd be seriously interested in helping with that project. I've worked on the source for Frotz in the past. I would be thrilled to play any text games on the INTV, at any rate. On a different front, I'm almost part of the "35 club" for Infocom games (to extrapolate from the 125-club a bit here). I'm only 4 CIB games away at this point. I've bought all the different collections in the past (Lost Treasures 1 & 2, the themed collections, Masterpieces), but then I decided to start collecting the individual boxed versions as well so that I would have all the original feelies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted February 24, 2013 Share Posted February 24, 2013 Well, Rick, stick around. I know we're a bit behind in this, but I hope to get back to it and have it finished this year. I would love to work on IF adventure games. However, I'll probably be concentrating on old-school graphic adventures, in the style of Sierra Online games. Even with an ECS, it's gotta be a pain to type on the Intellivision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted February 25, 2013 Share Posted February 25, 2013 Is there any benefit to releasing text adventures on cassette for the ECS vs. cart? Does the ECS provide more program memory when loading programs from cassettes vs. cart? Though at this point, it'd probably be harder finding an old data recorder that functions in general -- much less figuring out if it would be compatible with the ESC. Yeah, so never mind, I answered my own question. Cart it is! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DZ-Jay Posted February 25, 2013 Share Posted February 25, 2013 Is there any benefit to releasing text adventures on cassette for the ECS vs. cart? Does the ECS provide more program memory when loading programs from cassettes vs. cart? Though at this point, it'd probably be harder finding an old data recorder that functions in general -- much less figuring out if it would be compatible with the ESC. Yeah, so never mind, I answered my own question. Cart it is! You answered your own question. There's really no benefit to releasing it in a data cassette, and in fact, it would be a greater pain for everybody. Besides, ECS cassettes would have to be programmed in the crappy ECS BASIC, which is not only very limited, but excruciatingly slow. That said, there is no reason to require the ECS for text adventures, except to use the keyboard. However, like I said before, I rather work on graphic adventures that could be enhanced by a keyboard, but that don't really require it, like AGS games. -dZ. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvnut Posted February 25, 2013 Share Posted February 25, 2013 (edited) Is there any benefit to releasing text adventures on cassette for the ECS vs. cart? Does the ECS provide more program memory when loading programs from cassettes vs. cart? Emphatically no. The ECS provides a paltry 2K bytes of RAM. Even JLP only provides 16K bytes of RAM. Anything loaded from cassette needs to go into RAM. The Colossal Cave database requires around 128K bytes, and doesn't change. Far better to put it into ROM or something ROM-like, such as flash. To fit it in the available RAM, you'd either have to shorten the textual descriptions quite a bit, require the player to load new segments from cassette, or heavily compress the database. (The 128K bytes I quoted is uncompressed.) It's far easier just to put all that in ROM. ROM is cheap these days. EDIT: Also, the ECS cassette is 300 baud. That's less than 30 characters per second. You read faster than that. Do the math.... Edited February 25, 2013 by intvnut Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted February 25, 2013 Share Posted February 25, 2013 I've alluded to this before, but I see no reason that there's shouldn't be an option for text-message style input from the Intellivision controller keypad, for those who don't have an ECS. It'd be clunky, but no clunkier than what millions of teenagers do every day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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