Adventure: "The Last City"

[SRS]

It's kind of beta as I did not play it all the way but it should (!) work fine now:

"The Last City" Copyright (c) 1984 by Roger M. Wilcox / CPC Version Feb 2017 by SRS

The future has come and gone. Human technology had reached goals that surmounted even the most impractical dreams of the past. We had strived and succeeded, and
at last had begun to tap into the awesome power of...magic!

It was this which caused our civilization to crumble.

Your magical senses have drawn you to the vicinity of humanity's last city because of a warning. If not rescued very soon, the last of human technology will be erased from the planet.

[SRS]

Now a better working version (better user experience )

[||C|-|E||]

Aaah... that one is a really ancient game  The parser is super primitive but it deserves a lot of respect because, as far as I remember, it is a TR80 game and I think that these only had 16KB in the best case. Making something big would have required to load things in real time and I reckon that the floppy drives were not so common for the system. Moreover, it would have been very slow. The thing I really miss the most in this game, and it would have been possible to implement it, is something like GET ALL and DROP ALL. In any case, there are not many objects to worry about during the adventure 

[SRS]

I'm "stuck" to adventures which BASIC Source is available and not to big. Most QuickBasic i.e. are way to big to convert.

And - with this adventure I had the impression the author really creates some atmosphere within the given limits of his machine.

I will continue to search and convert - even if the games are not that ambitious or have parsers far inferior to the ones possible in Basic ...
our CPC just deserves to get more games.

[||C|-|E||]

I really think that converting these games is truly great. They expand the CPC catalog and they are historically important  It would also be very cool to put a bunch of adventures in a single DSK with a common loader. It is also tempting to try to add some new features, like a SAVE/LOAD functions, a few new commands... or even create a complete remake. PAWS would be a fantastic tool for the remakes, considering how "simple" they are (I mean, simple compared to a big PAWed adventure). Oh well, if only real life was not in the middle and time was not so scarce... 

[SRS]

I found a nice looking adventure (quick basic alike) wiht 95 rooms and room descriptions are around 300 bytes each i.e.- I worked on it quite one p-day now. I rewrote some of its parser and shrinked it's memory imprint but still CPC tells "out of memory". Maybe I don't get it "smaler" as there is a LOT of text (roundabout 1/2 of 60k) ... that would be a good try for paws - if I get enough time again ...

[||C|-|E||]

PAWS is actually very good compressing text and it can be very possible that, after compression, you still have room for something else. I managed to squeeze DDLE code in 61KB thanks to this. Without compression the game would be more than 80KB. Of course, loading the graphics in real time also saved a precious amount of RAM