AdventP (Or Adventure 500) From 1979 Now Listed On CASA

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Canalboy
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AdventP (Or Adventure 500) From 1979 Now Listed On CASA

#1 Post by Canalboy » Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:22 pm

Hello All.

The admininstrators have accepted the above game by George Richmond to the CASA database. If you liked the original Advent from 1976 but thought all spin-offs were too similar this is now available. Trust me it is very much its own game. It is very large and many of the puzzles are original although you will meet up with some old friends. Arthur O'Dwyer has placed this link on Dropbox where it can be downloaded.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pq6luvr4k1d2r8y/a500.zip?dl=0

Regards

Canalboy

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Garry
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Re: AdventP (Or Adventure 500) From 1979 Now Listed On CASA

#2 Post by Garry » Sat Jan 29, 2022 2:08 am

The CASA database's organisation of the entries for original Adventure is quite atrocious. This particular game is identified as RICH0500 in the Adventure family tree. It's great that it has now been recovered. The 'P' in 'AdventP' stands for 'Pascal', as it was written in Pascal.

The adventure family tree is currently offline, but here's what it says about this game in the last archived version (slightly edited by me):
On 8/11/15 [not sure if this is 8 Nov 2015, 11 Aug 2015 or 15 Nov 2008, as I could not find the original post] Tom A posted a query on rec.arts.int-fiction describing "an old game I played in the early 1980s on a CDC NOS machine. Called ADVENTP, it was very similar to ADVENT (the original Adventure). The interesting thing was that it was written in Pascal." He had a hard copy of the source code, which read: "ADVENTURE IN PASCAL - MARCH 1979" and "WRITTEN BY GEORGE H. RICHMOND ... AND THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO COMPUTING CENTER". Another poster found corroborating evidence in the form of a letter by Richmond published in the September 1979 issue of Pascal News: "In my spare time, I have worked on ... a version of Adventure written in Pascal . The original work was done on a CDC machine using the release 2 Zurich compiler. Then I transported it to an IBM machine using our modified AAEC compiler. The IBM operating system is MVS with TSO." Though the parentage of RICH0500 was at the time unclear, in a private email, David P. Erickson has demonstrated that it descends from ERIC0350. David has also verified the accuracy of Tom A's post.

Canalboy
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Joined: Tue Feb 18, 2020 10:31 pm

Re: AdventP (Or Adventure 500) From 1979 Now Listed On CASA

#3 Post by Canalboy » Sat Jan 29, 2022 1:26 pm

It does appear the the game was going to be increased in size by the author as in one particular area you move through a door and are greeted with the legend: "Colossal Cavern is under construction in this area. Please return
to this location at a later date for interesting Adventures."

It is however still possible to bag a maximum 500 points.

The two mazes in this game are both nasty. One of them has random exits, so you need to retry the same paths repeatedly to find all the locations. It is also easy to run out of matches to relight the lamp, although there is copious oil scattered around. Given the sheer size of the game, a few more matches would have made things much more pleasant. It is easy to blunder around the mazes and run out of matches.

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