With the exception of more Wander games (which I will rotate back to) I am technically done with 1978 for the All the Adventures project. I will be diving into 1979 soon, but I did find some versions of Adventure from 1977/1978 I missed for various reasons.
In two cases I had compilation issues and in one case I can’t find any related files. Can anyone help?
…
Jim Gillogly, 350 points, 1977. A literal port into C. Given there are no changes I can skip this one.
Bob Supnik, 366 points, 21st of October 1977. While the original source is not available, Stephen Lidie’s port is. Unfortunately it is intended for MacOS and I have not been able to compile it on my Windows Fortran compiler. (Also, this Adventure Family Tree is currently wrong — Lidie’s is 366 rather than 365 points, and it is derived from the Supnik version which isn’t listed at all.)
David Long, 501 points, 1978. Fortran IV source is available, but nobody seems to have compiled it due to it being not compatible with modern Fortran.
Gordon Letwin, 350 points, available by August 1978. This was apparently not a literal port as (for instance) Carolyn VanEseltine reports remembering “an African gray parrot in a pirate aviary, accessible by a rubber raft”. It was available on the Heath personal computer as opposed to a mainframe.
Renga in Blue 
I’m guessing you’ve already found it, but just in case, Gordon Letwin’s version of Adventure is on the second downloadable disk on the following page:
https://heathkit.garlanger.com/software/library/HUG/
I looked into the disk using the utilities from https://sebhc.github.io/sebhc/ – the emulator already has the disk in its dropdown. It looks like it needs HDOS to run.
The instructions (README.DOC) for this seem pretty involved. They speak of a one drive system, but none are provided for a two drive system.
I’m pretty sure I have a working copy of this version. I’ll check later today.
I’ve had this one for a while but it was being a pain to set up (like 7/8 years ago) and just had it on my queue since it hasn’t been a priority.
Sorry for the delay, but I finally got around to checking and I do indeed have a copy of Letwin’s Heathkit Adventure disk that runs as a simple bootable in the emulator, without the need for all those extra steps. I can’t recall exactly where I got it, but I assume it was passed along to me together with those Hoyle games. I can send it to you if you’d like, but after delving into things a bit I can see there was some confusion here:
The files in this one are all dated 1981, and the only extra/altered content is the same stuff from his Microsoft version, but here tailored to the platform (the computers in the Software Den are Heathkits, and the magazine is a REMark, this time in “Elvish”). I’d assume that this was added in after the Microsoft version came out, and that the original was just a straight vanilla Woods port, but I’m not sure. In any case, the version with the extra content (parrot, raft, etc.) that the poster in that thread remembered is a different, more poorly documented one also distrubuted by HUG, by Brian Barnes and Dave Sandage for the Zenith Z-100. Based on various things, I’d guess that it dates from around 1983. The link in that thread is still working, so that’s the one you may want to check out at some point. I skimmed through it quickly, and it seems to be based on Letwin’s (there’s a Programmer’s Room or some-such, and the copy of REMark) but then branches out into a little original content.
Looks like the Zenith version works directly in MS-DOS. There’s another link in there with a Dungeon/Zork variant named Qork, which I’ve gotten to work with Cygwin.
https://codeberg.org/gschmidl/interactive-fiction/src/branch/main/Qork.7z
That’s interesting, because we were just talking about Qork in the context of how rare Zork/Dungeon expansions are.
If you have some free time and want to check out something potentially interesting, take a look at the HP3000 version of Dungeon. I briefly checked it out because Roger had been asking Dan Hallock about getting a copy, and there’s something weird going on there. It’s 560 points, which makes no sense. Dungeon should only be 500 or 616 (with the endgame). It’s dated from late 1982 (also unique), and was converted by the HP3000 Users Group. Qork is 550 points, and this one doesn’t recognize some specific vocabulary that was added there, so there’s no relation between the two. I have the extracted game files, but they’re encrypted and you can’t really get anything from them. So someone needs to just trudge through the whole game at some point to see if there’s actually any additional content, or if they just fiddled with or messed up the scoring system when they ported it. Unfortunately, I just haven’t had the time to do it myself.
I would have a play through myself Rob, but like you I haven’t got the time at the moment to try it. Being methodical with these games is not a five minute job of course and I like to do a job properly.
I have had a quick dip into Qork. OPEN MAILBOX doesn’t work, presumably because the leaflet pertained to the original game. ODYSSEUS, HELLO SAILOR and ULYSSES are all identical. ZORK produces a different response to “at your service!” VERBOSE predictably doesn’t work but at least you can save your position. I tried swearing (I didn’t know any swear words until I asked H.R. for a pay rise) and that elicits a different response too. All the descriptions above ground appear to be identical on first glance.
I went through Qork a couple of months ago, when I first learned of it in the context of it having a connection (sort of) with Bob Supnik’s Adventure port and its descendants, including SVHA.
I won’t spoil it if you’re going to play, so I’ll just say that the differences amount to some minor things and two major ones. In any case, Zork/Dungeon expansions are very rare for various reasons, so it’s inherently interesting. It also has a murky history, since the name you’ll see attached to it, Steve Lidie, apparently just ported it (and Adventure 366) after getting the original code at his university circa 1980, and speculated that Supnik wrote it himself, which is definitely not true.
PLATO’s 1979 version was shaping up to be interesting with the thief’s stilletto (sic) but I got to the Temple, prayed and every takeable item in the game appeared at my feet. I did wonder if this was deliberate but I think it’s safe to say it was a bug. The account I used to log in kept corrupting too so I shelved it indefinitely.
yeah, I believe the general notion I had was the game was too buggy to worry about
but it is tantalizing in that I think it’s probably the kind of thing that it might be possible to whack through the bugs
one day when I’m feeling it (not after SVHA Adventure which has its own buggy issues)
I Think Quest may be a dinosaur too far however. I played it for hours and was only once ever able to pick up the dog. I still have it somewhere. The game that is.
The good news about Quest is that the two guys who have been working on it have recovered the original BASIC source code, and are in the process of converting it to something more modern as we speak. So hopefully a smoother playing, less buggy version of the game will surface in the not too distant future.