Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

Games for Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, Apple ][ and the rest of the 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Pleas for help, puzzles, bug reports etc.

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Garry
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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#16 Post by Garry » Wed Sep 02, 2020 3:09 pm

auraes wrote:
Wed Sep 02, 2020 2:10 pm
maybe it's just that you're a little frustrated and cranky that you never had a game published when you were a kid!
Not at all. It's just that I was always working on too many things and doing too much for other people and never got any of my own adventure projects finished. I ran an Atari users' group, edited their magazine, created their initial software library, ran a small adventure special interest group and wrote an adventure column for a UK computer magazine. Back in those days, all my adventures were in BASIC and most of them were ports from other machines like the TRS-80, Apple II and so on.

I wrote an adventure framework and wrote a really nice (and really fast) sci-fi adventure using it. It even had support for 'it' and 'again' and RAM save long before anyone else even thought of it. I have since ported this adventure to Inform 6 and expanded it considerably. I must finish it one of these days. It's quite a large game with some really complex (but fair) puzzles.

Believe it or not, I even wrote a Z-code interpreter in C for the Atari ST loosely based on the Infocom Task Force source code. It wasn't quite finished because I hadn't done the word wrap. I also wrote a program to extract all my Infocom 8-bit adventures from the Atari 8-bit and send the data to the Atari ST via a null modem so that I had some data files to test. That was a really clever bit of programming...and reverse engineering. I wish I still had a disk drive that worked so that I could find that utility and some other home brew adventures from other people that were never published.

I am the master of the unfinished project!

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#17 Post by auraes » Wed Sep 02, 2020 3:31 pm

I believe you.
I'm not nostalgic for those days. What do you think of the ZX Spectrum Next; does it make sense to you?

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#18 Post by Garry » Wed Sep 02, 2020 4:02 pm

No, but I'm not a Spectrum person. I could never understand how the Spectrum ZX became so popular in the first place, except for the fact that it was dirt cheap. It's a bugger of a thing to use. (Strident will be jumping down my neck as soon as I click Submit. He thinks it's the greatest thing since the ring-pull beer can. :lol: )

The Spectrum Next is way better of course. It would want to be after 30 years of technological advances. But why bother? Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just go and buy yourself a cheap PC.

In all fairness, the Spectrum ZX gave the world around 1000 text adventures, thanks mainly to The Quill, PAW and GAC. We have to be thankful for that. I am told that some of those games are actually quite good. I must get around to playing some of them one of these days.

(Thinks to self: 10,000 adventures on my TODO list at one per day will take me about 28 years to complete them all. Easy peasy!)

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#19 Post by auraes » Wed Sep 02, 2020 4:25 pm

Okay. Let's get back to the subject.
Some errors found:
- It is possible to examine the castle from anywhere, but especially the message 33 can never be displayed.

Code: Select all

>X CAST
 MESSAGE 15 "This is where the mean giant lives!"
 DONE   
>X CAST
 MESSAGE 33 "This is the castle where the giant lives."
 DONE   
- The word Bean should not be part of the directions vocabulary (<13)
- PLANT BEAN, outside the garden, displays the message "You can't do that here!" even if the bean is not carried or no longer exists. It should display "You can't do that."
- BREAK DOOR displays "How?" (if you don't have the axe) even if the door is already broken. It should display "You can't do that."

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#20 Post by Strident » Wed Sep 02, 2020 8:47 pm

Not as soon as you hit submit, Gary... but, yes... easiest thing in the world to use. :)

However... if you are emulating, then it makes a lot more sense to go for a 128K model where you don't have to get your head around the keyword system which only really makes sense with a proper keyboard.

(I will admit that these days I can never remember the finger gymnastics required for the various modes :) )

I'd love a Next but wouldn't have been able to afford one even if I hadn't just had five months of very low income with no idea when I'm next going to get paid... Stupid virus!

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#21 Post by auraes » Thu Sep 03, 2020 6:06 am

Strident wrote:
Wed Sep 02, 2020 8:47 pm
I'd love a Next but wouldn't have been able to afford one
I was sure you already had one! Apply for a quick fundraiser and I will contribute. If I don't feel like a ZX Spectrum Next - Issue 2 for me, it would be my pleasure if you have one. With all the work and knowledge you have on the subject. Don't let the stupid virus win!

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#22 Post by Strident » Thu Sep 03, 2020 7:12 am

Nah, it'd be impossible to justify or even enjoy that sort of purchase at the moment. Thanks for the offer but there are far better and more needy causes to donate to than unnecessary computers for middle-aged blokes. :)

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#23 Post by auraes » Thu Sep 03, 2020 7:38 am

Whether you have a ZX Spectrum Next or not, will not make this world better or worse.
You can kill Santa Claus (Père Noël), I never believed it.

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#24 Post by Dorothy » Thu Sep 03, 2020 2:11 pm

By all means do what you wish with this game, it is nothing special and was written as a fun game for my kids when they were young. Some of my other games are much more interesting.

The Quill was so limiting, never enough variables, I worked out a way to reuse them, nor enough memory in the C64. The art was to get as much in as possible.

I am still around and at the same email addy so contact me if you wish.
Dorothy

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#25 Post by Strident » Thu Sep 03, 2020 2:18 pm

I can remember Quill users like Laurence and Simon talking about this a lot back in the day; and it's the reasons why a lot of their games, and games by other Quill authors, have points-of-no-return in them (such as a one way boat trip); so the very limited number of flags could be reused.

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#26 Post by auraes » Thu Sep 03, 2020 4:02 pm

Thank you Dorothy for your response.
The source code is on my GitLab repository.
Last edited by auraes on Fri Nov 13, 2020 7:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#27 Post by auraes » Sat Sep 05, 2020 7:35 am

I added a PAWS version, well advanced.

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#28 Post by auraes » Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:10 am

There seems to be a bug in the PAW A17C interpreter. Because of the forced line feed, there is a reverse video character that shouldn't be there.

Code: Select all

LOCATION 0
{
   "You are in a Huge Room in the Castle. There are doors to the {20}{1}WEST{20}{0} and {20}{1}SOUTH{20}{0}.";
}
You are in a Huge Room in the
Castle. There are doors to the █
WEST and SOUTH.
Just add one more space before the {20}{1}WEST{20}{0} to fix this.

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Re: Land of the Giants (C64), Dorothy Millard

#29 Post by Strident » Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:18 am

Yes, there are various known issues with the word wrap and the control codes in (literally) edge case instances like that. It's why, if you look at various PAWed games, you'll see the author inserting a manual line break every so often when using coloured text highlighting.

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