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The Old House: text adventure game made with The GAC. Any tips ?

Started by Fabricius, 15:16, 06 May 22

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Fabricius

Hello,

I'm new here.

I like to play text adventure game from time to time, on different platforms. Nowadays they call it "interfactive fictions". This time I picked The Old House. It's an adventure made with The Graphical Adventure Creator.

It's game that appealed to me because of the humour: you play a special agent whose codename is Agent 03.5 :laugh: , and Miss Piggybank assigns you a mission.

Problem is, I'm stuck. When I'm stuck on an Amstrad CPC text adventure, what I do is to look at the DSK file and the RAM to see if there are some words in memory that could help me. It gives at least ideas, that's what I used for the 1001 BC game (a game in french).

Alas, The GAC encrypts the text so there's nothing useful.
Has anyone played this game ?

For those interested, there is an interview of The GAC author here:
interview with Sean Ellis. He speaks about a decompiler, but I don't know if it was done on the CPC, and I doubt it.

I'll keep trying.
Cheers!

Fabricius

I'm dumb. I looked again for a solution and I found one here.
Sorry for polluting the forum. At least I hope that some may find the interview interesting to read. It tells about how programming was done then. The author had no assembler then, he wrote all the assembly code ops by hand!

Gryzor

Haha yeah, well, when the game uses anti-cheating methods, googling for a walkthrough always helps😄

Strident

Always worth checking CASA, yes. ;)

I don't think we actually know much about the publication history of the three P. J. Hughes GAC adventures, sadly.

Re. decompilers... I tend to use unGAC, but that's only for Spectrum snapshots iirc. Grackle works with Amstrad snaps, but is really a player rather than a decompiler.
8-Bit Adventure Gamer / 8bitAG.com - 8bitAG.com/info - 8bitAG.com/games

ComSoft6128

If you run across a similar problem in the future, this might be helpful:

https://cpcrulez.fr/applications_disc-ESAT_software-viewtext.htm

It looks thru files and displays the contents - any text is usually quite visible.  

Skunkfish

@Fabricius 

Don't worry, you're certainly polluting the forum no more than the rest of us  :P

The Old House sounds interesting, I might give it a quick look. I spent many an hour creating awful games in GAC when I was a kid, after AA gave it away on the cover tape, it'll be nice to play a good one!
An expanding array of hardware available at www.cpcstore.co.uk (and issue 4 of CPC Fanzine!)

Nich

Quote from: Fabricius on 15:16, 06 May 22For those interested, there is an interview of The GAC author here:
interview with Sean Ellis. He speaks about a decompiler, but I don't know if it was done on the CPC, and I doubt it.

The GAC data file can be extracted and loaded back into GAC. It's what I do when I'm stuck in a GAC adventure. ;) Here's a BASIC listing that does it:

10 a=&BE80:e=a
20 l=210
30 FOR n=1 TO 12
40 c=0
50 FOR b=0 TO 7
60 READ h$:h=VAL("&"+h$)
70 POKE a,h:c=c+h:a=a+1
80 NEXT b
90 READ h:IF c<>h THEN PRINT"Error in line";l+(n-1)*10:END
100 NEXT n
110 INPUT "Name of GAC program";f$
120 a=&BEE0:GOSUB 160
130 INPUT "Name of data file to save";f$
140 a=&BEED:GOSUB 160
150 CALL e:END
160 POKE a,LEN(f$):a=a+1
170 FOR b=1 TO LEN(f$)
180 POKE a,ASC(MID$(f$,b,1)):a=a+1
190 NEXT
200 RETURN
210 DATA 21,E0,BE,46,23,CD,77,BC,1064
220 DATA EB,C5,E5,CD,83,BC,CD,7A,1512
230 DATA BC,E1,C1,09,01,00,40,ED,917
240 DATA 42,E5,2A,60,36,22,18,40,609
250 DATA 21,ED,BE,46,23,CD,8C,BC,1098
260 DATA 21,00,40,D1,01,00,00,3E,369
270 DATA 02,CD,98,BC,CD,8F,BC,21,1116
280 DATA CA,BE,7E,B7,28,06,CD,5A,1042
290 DATA BB,23,18,F6,CD,18,BB,C3,1103
300 DATA 00,00,50,72,65,73,73,20,557
310 DATA 61,20,6B,65,79,20,74,6F,717
320 DATA 20,72,65,73,65,74,2E,00,625

(This was designed to be used from disc.)

If you're using the WinAPE emulator, you can configure printer output to be sent to a file (go to Settings > Other, then under the Printer section, select the radio button labelled 'File', and enter a filename in the box below). Then you can select the printer menu in GAC and print the messages, rooms, conditions, verbs, nouns and objects to this file and analyse the code much more easily. :)

manossg

I am in a text adventure phase myself, so I'd like to give it a try!

WiltshireWizard

On

Gryzor

I bet champagne was poured when someone actually submitted a query to their page 😀

Strident

Quote from: Gryzor on 12:49, 08 May 22I bet champagne was poured when someone actually submitted a query to their page 😀
Joking aside, I remember those days well. Getting your site indexed by Ask Jeeves and also having an entry in the Yahoo directory was a major cause for celebration! 
8-Bit Adventure Gamer / 8bitAG.com - 8bitAG.com/info - 8bitAG.com/games

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