I wanted to write a larger program for the Replica 1 and quickly settled on writing a text adventure game. Something in the spirit of the games that ran on 8-bit microcomputers of the 1970s and 80s or the more ambitious Colossal Cave adventure that originally only ran on mainframes and minicomputers.
I started writing it in BASIC but some things were very awkward to do efficiently in Apple 1 BASIC (like no DATA statements and no arrays of strings). I also considered writing it in assembly language, but ended up writing it in C because the excellent CC65 assembler worked very well for me.
It's now ready for limited testing by my family members, after which I'll make it available as a free download including source code. Below is a screen shot of the opening screen.
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| Game Opening Screen |
It was written to run on the Apple Replica 1 although it is in portable C and should run on any system with a C compiler (I did most of the development and testing on a Linux system).
Because it was intended to run on the Replica 1 it was kept small and efficient to run within the 32K memory limit and only use uppercase characters and fit on a 40x24 character screen. It's a little too big to fit in an 8K EEPROM. It also won't run on an original Apple 1 with 4K of memory but I am willing to port it if someone sends me a system :-)
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