All the issues from my last post have been smoothed over and I just have to put everything together into a single winning run. Before I do that, I’d like to discuss an issue that cropped up here and elsewhere during this project.
On many of these games there is not one canonical version. While Sorcerer’s Castle Adventure was originally for the TRS-80, it’s been ported for C64 (see cover above) and possibly other systems. Even if I focus on just the TRS-80 original, there are three different versions in BASIC.
I’ve been playing “sorcast3.bas” from the above website, with the logic it was the latest revision, but I found out that any interaction with the vault crashes the game. “sorcast1.bas” works correctly (although sorcast3.bas was rather more enjoyable in that it didn’t have an inventory limit).
There’s another very odd difference you can see by comparing the title screens (sorcast1 on top, sorcast3 on bottom).
Poor Mr. Hassett’s name is mispelled in sorcast3.bas (which explains why I was misspelling his name in my last post). The name change, the removed inventory limit, and the vault bug suggest to me that sorcast3 is actually some sort of hacked version as opposed to one of the originals.
What about sorcast1 vs. 2? 2 has some strange word wrap in the descriptions which isn’t in the other two versions.
This means I’m going to stick with sorcast1. All this makes it irritating when I just want to find the most representative version and play.
It can get much worse. The upcoming game Dog Star adventure has 7 TRS-80 versions in BASIC and 1 in binary.
Renga in Blue 
Leave a Reply