Planet of Death

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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df
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Planet of Death

#1 Post by df » Mon Sep 19, 2011 2:57 am

I dug out Adventure A - Planet of Death for the c64, I have two versions an older version, looks hand written and the later Quill version. Neither version works with either of the two solutions in the archive. I've completed this before, maybe I need to write up a new solution. Most notably the 'use board' does not work etc.

In the older version you can go west from the start and get straight to the deep pit. the gloves are also in a different place, the old version has gloves in the maze.

It would be interesting to note all the differences.

Image

Maybe if I get time I'll do both and write a difinitive solution.

two gb64 links
1986 quill version
1984 version
-- Stu / DF --
-- Mountain Valley + Softgold Adventure Fan --

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Gunness
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Re: Planet of Death

#2 Post by Gunness » Wed Mar 07, 2012 2:41 pm

Did you find out anything?

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df
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Re: Planet of Death

#3 Post by df » Wed May 02, 2012 2:20 pm

have not had any time to check over it. its on my todo list.
-- Stu / DF --
-- Mountain Valley + Softgold Adventure Fan --

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Strident
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Re: Planet of Death

#4 Post by Strident » Sat Feb 01, 2020 11:11 am

An old thread, I know, but as I've been researching Planet of Death recently I thought I'd just add a few points here.

Both those versions were written with the Quill.

The earlier "blue" version is very "basic"... almost a straight port of the Artic original (which also exists as a distinct non-Quilled C64 game).

The colourful Quilled version was by AWJ Adam, later released as part of the Nick Hardy trilogy.

For reference, here are the Quill databases for each version of the game...

The "basic" one...
http://8bitag.com/temp/PLANET2.TXT

...and the more verbose version...
http://8bitag.com/temp/PLANET.TXT

These are completely different databases (one has not been expanded from the other). There are quite a lot of differences between the two versions of the game, even in fundamental areas like the vocabulary and weight limits.

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Re: Planet of Death

#5 Post by Exemptus » Sat Feb 01, 2020 8:01 pm

Given the very buggy nature of the original ZX81 version (and the Spectrum port) it would not surprise me if the Quilled versions coded certain things differently.

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Re: Planet of Death

#6 Post by Strident » Sun Feb 02, 2020 11:51 am

Exemptus wrote:
Sat Feb 01, 2020 8:01 pm
Given the very buggy nature of the original ZX81 version (and the Spectrum port) it would not surprise me if the Quilled versions coded certain things differently.
I believe, although I've never really gone through and checked, that the Spectrum 16K version had some content cut in order to fit it in... something to do with losing a bit of memory due to the differences in video display? I've no idea if this is the case and... well, Planet of Death really isn't a game that I fancy playing through a lot of... especially the original ZX81/80 version with the screen blinking!

Considering the vast majority of other "unofficial" versions, use the dissembled Spectrum code as their source, I imagine that they may not reflect some elements from the original ZX80/ZX81 version accurately.

The solution for one version of the game, on a particular system, doesn't always work for the game on other systems... Some versions don't have the alternate solutions to puzzles (such as the ice block). Some versions have different item weights. Some cause you to fall to your death if you cross the board with too many objects. The whole reason I unQuilled the C64 game was that someone had got stuck and couldn't solve a particular problem using the solutions that were out there.

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Re: Planet of Death

#7 Post by Exemptus » Sun Feb 02, 2020 12:52 pm

Strident wrote:
Sun Feb 02, 2020 11:51 am
I believe, although I've never really gone through and checked, that the Spectrum 16K version had some content cut in order to fit it in... something to do with losing a bit of memory due to the differences in video display? I've no idea if this is the case and...
I also think so. This makes sense because the Spectrum 16k had a lot less available RAM for the programmer to use than the ZX81 with the 16K rampack (a more or less standard configuration at the time). A bit less than 9k were available in the Spectrum while on the ZX81 you could use roughly 15k for code. The version I have on ZX81 loads in a single block of 13452 bytes, while on the Spectrum this is a 9000 byte block exactly. So some content was most probably cut, likely text messages (which are uncompressed; such techniques would not be seen until later). Someone with a disassembler and time to spare might be able to check the details.

Planet of Death is the only Artic adventure that runs on a 16k Spectrum. Apparently they realised that the 16k model was too restrictive, and the subsequent adventures required 48k. All this supports the point in case.

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Re: Planet of Death

#8 Post by jgerrie » Sat Feb 08, 2020 4:01 pm

Ported some source I found on line from the ZX81 version to TRS-80 MC-10. Complete walkthrough video here:
https://youtu.be/hlQTlEoR5ko. I remember lots of bugs in the original ZX81 source that I fixed in various ways to make it work like the walkthrough for the Speccy version, I think.

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Re: Planet of Death

#9 Post by Strident » Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:40 am

jgerrie wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 4:01 pm
Ported some source I found on line from the ZX81 version to TRS-80 MC-10.
I added all the various "unofficial" conversions I could find to the game pages, including yours Jim. That's the type of information I'd personally ideally like to see on all the games pages.

Unless you found some source code I've not come across, I think it's likely to have been Paul Taylor's source that he extracted from the Spectrum version and has since been used for the basis of virtually all the later "unofficial" ports, including the backports to ZX80 & 81. As mentioned earlier, there should be a fairly straightforward way of checking, as the ZX81 and Spectrum versions do differ (at least that's what various sources say)... it's just a case of going back and working out *where* exactly they differ... A task I don't really want to take on as the original ZX81/80 version is almost unplayable as they hadn't come up with a workaround for the whole screen-flashing issue at that time.

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Re: Planet of Death

#10 Post by jgerrie » Tue Feb 11, 2020 3:01 am

You're right. Here's the info on the source I used for my port to BASIC.

// "Planet of Death: Adventure A". Original by Artic Computing, ported to
// TI-89 and TI-92+ by Zeljko Juric, based on generic C port by Paul Taylor.
// You need TIGCC crosscompiler with library 2.0 or greater to compile it.
// Use "tigcc -O2 pldeath.c" to compile.

Thanks for adding a reference to my port on the game page.

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Re: Planet of Death

#11 Post by df » Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:04 pm

wow. blast from the past.

yes when I wrote this thread in 2012 I had 3+ versions for C64. I could have sworn but did not check that the blue/white was not quill/paw. it just played so badly, also it was so condensed that it really didnt need to be if it was quill/paw. anyway.

I dont know If I remember seeing C reversed source but I def had Z80 source disassemble and it was clearly based on Kens practical computing article from 1980 which was based on Scott Adams adventureland design
-- Stu / DF --
-- Mountain Valley + Softgold Adventure Fan --

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Re: Planet of Death

#12 Post by Strident » Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:33 pm

df wrote:
Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:04 pm
wow. blast from the past.
yes when I wrote this thread in 2012 I had 3+ versions for C64. I could have sworn but did not check that the blue/white was not quill/paw. it just played so badly, also it was so condensed that it really didnt need to be if it was quill/paw. anyway.
I did this image a while back to sum up the various C64 versions... :)
Image

On the subject of Artic adventures, I put together this page of early Artic advertisements, which included mentions of the ZX80 versions of the early games; that aren't archived anywhere...
http://8bitag.com/info/artic.html

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Re: Planet of Death

#13 Post by df » Fri Jun 05, 2020 12:21 am

Interesting. I want to say the bottom right trilogy version was included in the C64 'ProPack' set one of my mates had. I think I had all those versions you showed except the Pain version. ProPack might have been an Sustralia only thing too. I dont know.
-- Stu / DF --
-- Mountain Valley + Softgold Adventure Fan --

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