Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure now in Google Play Store

Back in April 2012, I wrote a text adventure game  as an experiment to try out the CC65 C compiler on the Briel Replica 1 computer  (an Apple 1 replica). Because it was written in C, it also ran under Linux, and any platform that supported a reasonable C compiler. I also ported it  to the Briel Altair 8800 computer running CP/M using the BDS C compiler.

When the Raspberry Pi store opened, I packaged it and submitted it as one of the first applications in the Raspberry Pi store.

Later, I made a GUI version using the Qt Toolkit , which is portable to a number of platforms. I intend to release the Qt version into the Raspberry Pi store, but have not gotten around to doing that yet.

With Qt now supporting Android, I tried building it for Android to run on a tablet, and it worked almost flawlessly without any changes. I made a few small tweaks for Android, and packaged it for the Google Play store. It is now available as a free Android application.

Android Version of The Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure

I doubt that any application before has run on an Apple 1, CP/M, Linux desktop, Raspberry Pi, and Android tablet - devices that span almost 40 years of computing and differences in computing power of several thousand times.

My Text Adventure Game Running on CP/M

After a couple more hours of work and I have my Abandoned Farmhouse text adventure game ported to CP/M using the BDS C compiler. The changes were similar to those needed for the Yum game, and included some changes for the available string functions and initialization of some large arrays.

I haven't played the game to completion but it seems to be working well. You can find source code and a CP/M binary here.

Below is a transcript of playing a short game.


B>advent
                      Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure
                            By Jeff Tranter

Your four-year-old grandson has gone missing and was last seen headed in the
direction of the abandoned family farm. It's a dangerous place to play. You
have to find him before he gets hurt, and it will be getting dark soon...

? help
Valid Commands:
Go east/west/north/south/up/down
Look
Use object
Examine object
Take object
Drop object
Inventory
Help
Quit
You can abbreviate commands and directions to the first letter.
Type just the first letter of a direction to move.
? i
You are carrying:
  flashlight
? l
You are at the door to the house.
You see:
  key
  bottle
You can go: east west
? drop flashlight
Dropped flashlight.
? t key
Took key.
? t bottle
Took bottle.
? n
You can't go north from here.
? l
You are at the door to the house.
You see:
  flashlight
You can go: east west
? w
You are in the kitchen.
? l
You are in the kitchen.
You see:
  candybar
You can go: south east down
? t candybar
Took candybar.
? w
You can't go west from here.
? l
You are in the kitchen.
You see:
  nothing special
You can go: south east down
? s
You are in the dining room.
? l
You are in the dining room.
You see:
  stale meat
You can go: north west
? u stale meat
The meat looked and tasted bad. You feel very sick and pass out.
Game over after 7 turns.
Do you want to play again (y/n)? n

B>

Adventure Game for Replica 1 Available

After some beta testing by family members my adventure game for the Replica 1 is available for download from here. I'd like to hear from anyone who gives it whirl. Were you able to complete it? Was it too easy? Too hard?

Coming Soon - A Text Adventure Game

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.

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 :-)