Colossal Cave on Inty?

[JohnPCAE]

Lately I've been digging into Colossal Cave Adventure and I ran across a BASIC port of it (I think it's for the TRS-80 Color Computer). I've never messed with IntyBasic. What do people think about an Inty port? Anyone interested in taking a stab at it?

 

Here is the original Youtube video of it in action, and after that is a link to the BASIC source.

 

 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jggames/trs80mc10/master/quicktype/Text Adventures/ColossalCave/COLOSSAL16.TXT

[+Rick Reynolds]

I'm a big fan of text adventures in general.  I'd love to see an attempt made using the ECS - either Adventure or possibly a port of Zork 1, assuming there is enough space.

[+cmadruga]

I recall hearing something on this topic before. Maybe Joe was looking into it at one point?

 

I have a project in mind in this space, but it’s not about this particular game.

Edited November 1, 2022 by cmadruga

[carlsson]

Do enough users have an ECS with the keyboard? I think something along the line of point and click might be more interesting than pure text adventures. Also those tend to take a fair bit of RAM so you probably would need a LTO Flash! or other device with JLP RAM as well as the ECS and its keyboard. Nothing impossible, just reducing the target group somewhat.

[artrag]

Intybasic almost does not support strings and 47 words are probably too few when we need to manipulate them...

Moreover without a keyboard it is hard to think to a direct port, you should adapt the interface somehow

 

 

 

[carlsson]

Oh dear, I completely overlooked the weak string handling in IntyBASIC. It is great for action and strategy games, but not for text oriented stuff. Yes, it would be a PITA to make a type-in text adventure with more limiting factors than benefits.

 

Actually I think both the Keyboard Component (which is super rare) and the Aquarius would be more suitable targets for this particular type of game.

[+fdr4prez]

would anyone be interested in using the keypad for the letters/numbers - like the old school phone texting

 

 

[+DZ-Jay]

7 hours ago, cmadruga said:

I recall hearing something on this topic before. Maybe Joe was looking into it at one point?

 

I have a project in mind in this space, but it’s not about this particular game.

Joe ported the original virtual machine to the Intellivision.  I recall it had had a buffer to hold the string information before parsing, which allowed you to edit commands, and even scrolled the screen and wrapped text.

 

I believe I have the source of that project somewhere, back when it was a collaboration project between Valter Prette, Joe Z., and I (but mostly Joe).  It included some tools to encode the strings as well, I believe.  I'll try to dig it up.

 

    dZ.

[carlsson]

Hm, the ECS supports a music keyboard, right? Perhaps someone could port Loom and optionally enable input through that keyboard.

[JohnPCAE]

Another project I'm working on would be an add-on that would give you a USB port. You'd plug it into the cartridge port like an Intellivoice. It only gives a single powered USB port, but you could use a small hub to give you enough ports for a keyboard and mouse. I just ordered some experimental circuit boards for it this afternoon. Component-wise, it only requires a Raspberry Pi Pico and three level-shifter IC's.

 

My thinking is that it would take over addresses $007C and $007D. Like the ACC, $007C would be a register index and $007D would be a register value. That would be enough to support multiple HID devices (keyboard, mouse, gamepads, etc.)

Edited November 1, 2022 by JohnPCAE

[JohnPCAE]

The point is that I wouldn't fret too much about the lack of a keyboard. I believe that part to be solvable with a very small add-on.

Edited November 2, 2022 by JohnPCAE

[JohnPCAE]

If you but two controllers together, you can get a decent keyboard this way as well. Three of the side buttons could have these functions (and we have six at our disposal with two controllers):

- change mode (letters <---> numbers and symbols)

- backspace

- hold for alternate letter (R/T, F/G, etc.)

Edited November 2, 2022 by JohnPCAE

[Zendocon]

On 11/1/2022 at 6:33 PM, fdr4prez said:

would anyone be interested in using the keypad for the letters/numbers - like the old school phone texting

 

 

That's exactly how I handled text input in Little Man Computer, at least when you're creating symbol names and naming your project.

 

I was thinking about porting Dunnet to Tutorvision at one point, before I went with Little Man Computer instead.  Why Tutorvision?  The other issue that's inevitably brought up whenever somebody discusses porting a text adventure has to do with the amount of available Graphics RAM.

 

On a standard Intellivision, you can't buffer the whole screen, meaning you're limited to the 20x12 character dimensions.  But the Tutorvision has enough GRAM that you can shoehorn two characters into every background card uniquely, doubling your text resolution to 40x12.

[decle]

As has been pointed out by @DZ-Jay and @cmadruga, like so many things in the Intellivision world, JoeZ got there first.  In this case just over a decade ago...

 

 

Whilst this posting contains the instructions to run the ROM, I think the latest greatest version can be found in the following posting, but you might want to take a look through the thread...

 

[devwebcl]

A joystick could be used to select words (verbs, nouns) from the interface.

 

Similar to Gunslinger from the atari 8bit.

 

http://manillismo.blogspot.com/2020/06/gunslinger.html

 

[JohnPCAE]

I spent part of the afternoon crawling through JoeZ's code. It's next-level stuff. I'd love to enhance it to support the ACC but I'm not sure where to begin. The big issue is carving out the D000-DFFF address range for the ACC's memory buffer.

Edited November 3, 2022 by JohnPCAE

[First Spear]

On 11/3/2022 at 11:19 AM, Zendocon said:

[snip]

On a standard Intellivision, you can't buffer the whole screen, meaning you're limited to the 20x12 character dimensions.  But the Tutorvision has enough GRAM that you can shoehorn two characters into every background card uniquely, doubling your text resolution to 40x12.

 

When I was musing about text adventuring a while ago, I was thinking about how to get enough text on screen to make things readable (kind of piggybacking on the "soft font" thread here in the forum). It occurred to me that while the combinations of english letters is large to make a word, the number of combinations is finite and using a thesaurus can help the vocabulary-challenged like me. For example, using "get" instead of "take" saves horizontal pixels, so I thought once that reserving 40 locations of GRAM to display two lines of text, having text "This cold room has 2 windows and a door to the south" stored in ROM and then the font generator converting that to GRAM would work. Lots of other worms in that can to open up, of course.

 

 

[Zendocon]

On 11/14/2022 at 11:16 AM, First Spear said:

When I was musing about text adventuring a while ago, I was thinking about how to get enough text on screen to make things readable (kind of piggybacking on the "soft font" thread here in the forum). It occurred to me that while the combinations of english letters is large to make a word, the number of combinations is finite and using a thesaurus can help the vocabulary-challenged like me. For example, using "get" instead of "take" saves horizontal pixels, so I thought once that reserving 40 locations of GRAM to display two lines of text, having text "This cold room has 2 windows and a door to the south" stored in ROM and then the font generator converting that to GRAM would work. Lots of other worms in that can to open up, of course.

Can of worms indeed.  When I first conceptualized RobotFindsKitten, I had in mind to buffer the description window (60 GRAM positions) with a mini-font.  In addition, I wanted to Huffman-encode all the text so I could fit more descriptions into ROM space.  That was back when I was still working with the original 16K memory model.

[JohnPCAE]

*sigh*

 

THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY I CREATED THE ACC! So we could have much more interesting games on the Inty!

 

You have no idea how frustrating this is. I have two complete ACC units just sitting right in front of me that I'm prepared to gift to developers for free. And yet I have no takers. You get 40x24 text, even 80x24 text if you want to, and it's super-easy to set up. While it provides all kinds of other features like a coprocessor, extra RAM, graphics modes, and a parallel port, you don't have to use them. I've even posted with it an example of how to detect it and set up 40x24 text mode. It's incredibly easy to program for the ACC.

 

And yet no one wants it.

[Zendocon]

On 11/16/2022 at 9:36 PM, JohnPCAE said:

*sigh*

 

THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY I CREATED THE ACC! So we could have much more interesting games on the Inty!

 

You have no idea how frustrating this is. I have two complete ACC units just sitting right in front of me that I'm prepared to gift to developers for free. And yet I have no takers. You get 40x24 text, even 80x24 text if you want to, and it's super-easy to set up. While it provides all kinds of other features like a coprocessor, extra RAM, graphics modes, and a parallel port, you don't have to use them. I've even posted with it an example of how to detect it and set up 40x24 text mode. It's incredibly easy to program for the ACC.

 

And yet no one wants it.

Wait, what?  This is the first I've heard of an ACC unit.  What is it?  And it's free for the taking?  Sign me up.

[JohnPCAE]

It's here, at the end of a five-year odyssey. I have two spares that I'm willing to give to people interested in developing for it.