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End of Year Random Text Adventure Ports

Started by Strident, 00:17, 31 December 19

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Strident


Random ports, produced mostly for my own amusement during the past week or so, while I've been testing some new tools out that I want to use on proper projects...

A Trolls Revenge, a mini-adventure ported to CP/M, downloadable here...
http://8bitag.com/games/trolls-revenge.html

Deer Creek, an "educational" text adventure for kids or newcomers to the genre
...available both as a PAWed CP/M game and also as a specific Amstrad CPC title, powered by DAAD...
http://8bitag.com/games/deer-creek.html

Deception of the Mind's Eye, part one of an unfinished multi-part game from 1993, ported to CP/M+ (CPC 6128 only)
http://8bitag.com/games/deception2.html
8-Bit Adventure Gamer / 8bitAG.com - 8bitAG.com/info - 8bitAG.com/games

Gryzor

Making them playable online-always a nice touch 🙂

Strident

#2
Quote from: Gryzor on 09:13, 31 December 19
Making them playable online-always a nice touch 🙂
Well, both Deer Creek and A Troll's Revenge started as online games, created with Chris Ainsley's excellent Adventuron system which was designed to make 8-bit style text and graphics adventures. That's the system the games were developed on... it's so quick and easy to use.


The source code from those versions were run through Chris' A2P converter... which helps turn Adventuron code into a version for inPAWs.


After a lot of tweaks and manual changes, the inPAWs code generates a PAWed version for Spectrum and, with some other changes, a CP/M PAWed version for Amstrad CPC and PCW.


Additionally, the Deer Creek Amstrad CP/M source file was then run through Stefan Vogt's ANTUR transcompiler to convert it to a DAAD source file, which is what was used to generate a tape/disk version for Amstrad CPC. (That file also can be used to create a Spectrum, MSX, C64, Plus/4, Amiga, Atari ST and PC DOS version too).


Deception of the Mind's Eye was a bit different as it was a Spectrum 128K game... that required the use of a new tool, called Inpaws Pager, which extracted the 128K database and converted it to an inPAWs file... There was just enough space in the CP/M+ version of the PAWs to compile it for CPC6128. (If you use PAWs under CP/M+ you can take advantage of the 61K available for that operating system when you make your PAWs games)


There are all sorts of tools being developed for this sort of stuff. Uto has a new version of his unPAWs tool which will export to the latest version of his DAAD compiler, which means you can go from Spectrum PAWs to a cross-platform DAAD version in virtually one step now.

Uto also has extensions available, called MALUVA, which let you add bitmap graphics to DAAD adventures, fixes the saving issues on several platforms, and also... more importantly for text-only authors... allows you to not only add a whole new chunk of extra messages to your game but gives you the ability to load messages from disk. This lets Amstrad DAAD games, on disk, be much bigger than the 61K-ish limit we had with CP/M PAWs. This is the tech that was used to get the Spectrum 128K game Unhallowed onto the Amstrad. (see thread elsewhere)
8-Bit Adventure Gamer / 8bitAG.com - 8bitAG.com/info - 8bitAG.com/games

zeropolis79

I always thought Speccy PAW code could work straight away on CPC/PCW PAW like GAC (with the exception of graphics)

Strident

Quote from: zeropolis79 on 11:05, 04 January 20
I always thought Speccy PAW code could work straight away on CPC/PCW PAW like GAC (with the exception of graphics)
Well... yes... and no...

...Yes, if you can get the Spectrum PAWs code into a text file for CPC/PCW (CP/M) PAW then it (mostly) works... In the old days we had to retype in the database by hand... these days there are nice tools like inPAWs to help do that grunt work. :)

...and No... There are quite a number of differences between the Spectrum PAW and CP/M PAW which will usually mean you have to do additional work to get a Spectrum PAWed game working on CP/M PAW... Some of the differences are minor, some of the differences are more problematic... especially if you are unaware of them. And Spectrum games often need reworking for the different screen size. You also can't use all the advanced screen control features of Spectrum PAW in CP/M PAW.

I put together a guide on how to convert a Spectrum PAWed game to Amstrad CPC/PCW here... http://8bitag.com/info/zx-cpm.html There is a whole document that highlights the differences between the two systems... http://8bitag.com/info/documents/spectrum-cpm-paws-differences-1e.pdf


The same goes with moving from PAW to DAAD... a lot of the system is similar, but there are plenty of differences to trip up the unwary.
8-Bit Adventure Gamer / 8bitAG.com - 8bitAG.com/info - 8bitAG.com/games

zeropolis79


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