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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : CMM2: More creaky old text adventures (SAAINT)
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thwill Guru  Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4047 |
ROFLOL You're very welcome, Tom Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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Rickard5 Guru Joined: 31/03/2022 Location: United StatesPosts: 463 |
No thrill if only someone could Port Eamon Text Adventures, I'd be that Happy 13 year old playing away on his APPLE ][ with out a Clue how hard life will be as we get older I may be Vulgar, but , while I'm poor, I'm Industrious, Honest, and trustworthy! I Know my Place |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9308 |
Hey Rickard5 - Blake's 7 logo for an avatar! Nice one, my son!   My favourite ever SiFi next to Dr. Who(classic series and some of the new stuff) and Star Trek(TOS/TNG/VOY/DS9) But I digress..... Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Rickard5 Guru Joined: 31/03/2022 Location: United StatesPosts: 463 |
Grogster I have a Theory now think about the Last Series and Kind of the way Avon always just sort of misses Serverland I think there is more to Avon then we are ever told, from the escape to the end where everybody dies, I think Serverland was Anna Grant and Avon was a Federation Man, otherwise how did he Know so much about the Federation banking system and computer network ? and so Anna Grant was assigned to Avon to keep him inline to the party. and when she failed she had to fake her death and reinvent her self as Serverland and take Avon down before her Failure takes her down :) Now MY Doctor has to be Tom Baker I mean he Gave us Sara Jane and was married to Romonna IRL! I Had a mad Crush on 2 English birds in 6th grade Sara Jane Smith and 1970's Felicity Kendal bur I too Digress I may be Vulgar, but , while I'm poor, I'm Industrious, Honest, and trustworthy! I Know my Place |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6808 |
But we *all* had a crush on Felicity Kendal. :) Ah... Blake's 7. Home of some of the most wobbly sets and cheap effects ever used on TV. Excellent stuff! For me, though, no film or TV SF has managed to better Babylon 5. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9308 |
DEFINETLY more to Avon then we are ever told, but that's what makes the character so intriguing. Played SUPERBLY by Paul Darrow. Anna Grant was Anna in the same episode as Servalan, so they can't be the same person, as they both co-existed in the same episode - and in the same scenes together - as different characters, most notably when Avon kills Anna before Anna can kill him, while Servalan is still chained to the wall of the dungeon in the same scene.  Rumours of Death is the episode I am referring to - S3E8. S2E9 - Countdown - sets up this story ahead of time while the Blake character is still around. I have all four seasons on DVD - the very first box-set of DVD's I ever purchased, as soon as the BBC released the series on DVD. Oh, I was a happy camper when I received those discs!  My doctor was Colin Baker. I actually really liked his portrayal of the character, just not the gawd-awful costume, but then no-one other then JNT liked it either!!! Colin himself hated his own costume, and I don't blame him. But I loved how Colin brought back the irritability of the Hartnell era doctor. We will not speak of how the modern series has essentially destroyed canon in that department, and I choose to simply ignore that entire load of b.s. My mad crush was Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton.(Davison era) I always thought she looked so hot in that crushed velvet outfit. Ahhhh, memories of my youth....  Sorry - don't mean to hijack this thread. Send me a PM if you want to talk more about this off the forums. I won't post another reply here - quite a bit off topic now. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4047 |
Hi folks, Thanks I was not aware of Eamon though I recall a ZX Spectrum game (name long forgotten) that I suspect was written by someone ripping it off ... and proceeded to write my own (unpublished) BBC Micro game that ripped that off in turn .I had a brief look at what would be involved with an MMBasic port and found that whilst the Eamon games do share a common "interpreter" it looks like it was customised, quite heavily in some cases, for each adventure. This is unlike the Scott Adams games where an identical interpreter can basically play 30+ games. Anyway, probably not something I'm going to find the time for, shame. Not at all. If someone wants to write a brand new SAAINT compatible text adventure based on one of these properties then @Turbo46 can teach you how ... but he will probably recommend you don't ask me to do the Q/A .Down and safe, Tom Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| Rickard5 Guru Joined: 31/03/2022 Location: United StatesPosts: 463 |
Hi Thwill Once my CMM Gets to the USA ( Between Monday and Friday) if I can figure out how to write Adventures, I'll Happily write tons of them if just one person plays them :) My Question how hard will this port be to port to the Picomite VGA, I got my Picomite VGA 1.2 board a few days ago and my Parts order in Yesterday, I HOPE TO HAVE IT BUILT SOON :) Funny story when I was in Jr.high school - High School like you GCSE year I was working my though the infocom games and I got to HHGTG and GOD did it SCREW ME UP figuring it out, not only the game but the sillyness of being British This was few years before I got lost down the Rabbit hole of British TV  Rick I may be Vulgar, but , while I'm poor, I'm Industrious, Honest, and trustworthy! I Know my Place |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4047 |
Bill (@Turbo46) can point you in the direction of how to write them for SAAINT and perhaps share some of his tools. Finding someone to play them is more of a challenge, there are definitely more members of this community interested in creating 80's style games than there are in playing them. At the moment SAAINT won't run on either PicoMite or PicoMite VGA. Its RAM footprint is too big - it needn't be, it's just that limited RAM wasn't an issue when orginally written to target the CMM2 so I was profligate. I hope to port it at some point over the next couple of months, but free time is in short supply at the moment, and the parts for my PicoMite VGA are on the slow boat from China. Speaking of HHGTG you can play that (and many of the other Infocom classics) on the CMM2 using Z-MIM. There is also a PicoMite (serial console, not VGA) version included in that repository but it's limited to 64 Kb adventures and it's very slow. I really need to revisit Z-MIM, update it using some of the bells and whistles from SAAINT and replace some of the BASIC with CSUBs. Best wishes, Tom Edited 2022-04-09 01:11 by thwill Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6808 |
Z-MIM is excellent on the CMM2. I gave that a bit of a test too. :) :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| Rickard5 Guru Joined: 31/03/2022 Location: United StatesPosts: 463 |
>open Mailbox >read leaflet >XYZZY > I just got ate by GRUE I may be Vulgar, but , while I'm poor, I'm Industrious, Honest, and trustworthy! I Know my Place |
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Turbo46 Guru Joined: 24/12/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1611 |
I can, but I'll have to do some documenting and tidying up first. While I learnt a lot while producing the 'adventure'. Both about the 'Adventure database format" and MMBasic programming the like of which I had not done before it was ultimately a bit of a let down. You spend a lot of time producing the adventure database, testing and correcting. Then end up with an adventure that you know inside and out and is no fun to play and no-one else wants to either. You do need someone to try it out and report bugs and inconsistencies and Tom's help in that area was invaluable. Both with his knowledge of the adventure database system (having written SAAINT) and his experience with adventure games. It would have been very rough around the edges without his help. Watched the all but I think you might get a clue from my signature which one I prefer. Bill Keep safe. Live long and prosper. |
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| Turbo46 Guru Joined: 24/12/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1611 |
Hi Tom, I noticed some activity on SAAINT in GITHUB. Is there any reason to update my version if SAAINT? Bill PS. Must try it on MMB4W now that I've started using it. Keep safe. Live long and prosper. |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4047 |
No reason to update, I was just adapting it to use the latest version of 'splib'. I was looking again at getting it running on the PicoMite, but the naively transpiled version has too many funs/subs/labels. I guess I'm going to have to get around to providing sptrans with the capability to omit unused code sooner than I had intended. Best wishes, Tom Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| Turbo46 Guru Joined: 24/12/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1611 |
I suppose that is a penalty of having larger but more versatile library (.inc) files. Probably it comes from usually having a compiler to sort the wheat from the chaff? I can think of a couple of ways you could do that but I was wondering what your approach would be? Bill Keep safe. Live long and prosper. |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4047 |
Hi Bill, I would have said it was closer to what the linker does in some ways, but same difference. Two passes: Pass 1: Existing parse and transpiler pass but also writing a file containing the offset where each SUB/FUNCTION begins and ends and the location of each potential call; only potential because unlike C you can't distinguish between an MMBasic call and an array until you know what SUBs/FUNCTIONs there are. Pass 2: Use the file written in pass 1 to identify and eliminate unused SUBs/FUNCTIONs without requiring a re-parse. I previously wrote a utility called 'spflow' that does some of this for the purposes of generating a control-flow graph for an MMBasic program but it's not quite right (and would be superseded by) for this task and also unnecessarily slow because it does two full parses of the MMBasic. For performance I should really rewrite my transpiler in C because I never actually run it on 'mite hardware itself - I did start on a JavaScript version as a training exercise but beyond it's use for learning JavaScript I'm not sure that is the correct path to pursue. Best wishes, Tom Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| Turbo46 Guru Joined: 24/12/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1611 |
Of course, it's a looong time since I use a compiler and linker etc. Bill Keep safe. Live long and prosper. |
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