One fascinating thing about history — and this is true can be true of both older and more recent — is how often namespace clash can interfere with research. Is the John Smith you are checking in 18th century records the same John Smith you are looking for, or an entirely different one? In modern times, see my hunt for Doug Rogers. Some people are forgotten to history simply because their names aren’t easy to search for. Maybe parents who pick unusual spellings for their children are onto something.
This can apply to companies as well.
There’s Ramtronics, the US company who manufactured hardware for processing motion pictures and was up for technical Academy Awards, like this 1968 one for “engineering an automatic exposure control for printing-machine lamps.” One of the nominees (E. Michael Meahl) shows up later as an engineer at Caltech.
They seem to have no relationship to Ramtronics, the company out of London, who I’ve only seem manifest via ads in a narrow window of 1982 (like here) for the game Africa Diamond, on the Acorn Atom computer. I’ve seen no evidence of them appearing before or since but I’m getting overwhelmed by references to the other, much more prominent Ramtronics, so maybe one history is blotting out another.
The source code contains the line (c) BEND 1982 which suggests the name of a person, by my guess the sole proprietor of the company who put out ads for their single game.
As the ad above explains, we’re searching an Old Country House for a diamond, and spooky and/or fantasy-adjacent things are about to go down. This of course is an identical plot to Mystery House (Japanese version) and Mansion Adventure; transferring finding loot in a cave to finding loot in a house just seemed like the easiest next step.
What also isn’t really a copy of Crowther/Woods — but people tried a stab at — is the adventure-roguelike genre. Here the overall map is always the same, but items are randomly placed. There are also enemies that appear at random, and the moment of getting at the diamond also requires getting past a random puzzle.
I’m wondering if this is another case of a player who had seen Madness and the Minotaur as there’s a bit of a similar vibe, especially in the somewhat mechanical way room directions are mentioned.
The problem is that room directions don’t always seem to work as described. For example, on the screen above, you can’t go north, you have to GO STAIRS. Rather more egregiously, rather than being able to GO SOUTH, you need to GO OUTSIDE (which also requires a key, which is a little unclear from the game’s setup).
Some rooms just describe exits that aren’t there:
I did, after great pains, produce a map of a “ground floor”…
…and an “upper floor”. No objects are listed because none are in stable positions.
In order to see any objects, you need to LOOK, and do it in every single room.
The RNG packed this one, usually there’s 0, 1, or 2.
I do say pains because, in addition to the slight mismatch between room description and exits, enemies randomly appear.
They are technically only deadly if you insist on hanging around in a room. You can always leave and come back. The monsters are not dictated by positioning (so not Crowther/Woods style, which actually keeps tracks of where the dwarves and you can get chased around) but can appear anywhere at any time and with no particular logic.
They can be killed, usually by dropping the right item. Vampires succumb to a SILVER CRUCIFIX. The man-eating rabbit can be scared away with a FERRET.
I say “usually” for two reasons. One is that sometimes even if you are using the right object it just doesn’t work and you die anyway.
This is flashing green and orange.
The other exception is because one enemy you use no item at all, the dwarf. Typing KILL DWARF will have the game prompt if you mean with your bare hands, to which you can say YES, and the game will just repeat the question.
The fact the message repeats makes it appear that this really is a rhetorical question and you should move on, but no, the game is just wanting you to be persistent: you have to type YES three times in a row to the “with your bare hands” prompt before the game lets you do it.
I’ve observed games improving on the Crowther/Woods “fight the dragon” moment, but I’ve never seen a game mimic it and then make it worse! (This is made triply worse by the fact this is the only enemy not defeated by dropping something.)
It would be nice if you could just ignore all the different monsters, but unfortunately certain exits are predicated on score, which increases based on killing monsters. For example, if you bring a torch into the secret passage past the library, you still can’t go down if you haven’t killed enough — I guess this is “experience points”?
Going down incidentally leads into a cave, which follows the exact same map as the upper floor, and actually is the upper floor, because any items left up top show up in the same places in the caves.
The ad vaguely alludes to advanced programming. It must mean something like this (we’ve seen this re-use before in Wolpert’s Mystery Mansion where a maze collapses and turns into a different maze, but not otherwise as far as I know).
The cave is much more explicit about exits and is much easier to map than the upper floor.
Upstairs has the cupboard with a safe containing the diamond, but again, you are stymied from opening the cupboard. by your lack of monster-killing: you need a certain score. The game is never clear about this.
The upshot of all this is that, gameplay-wise, is that you should wander the map looking for a key (that will allow escape later) and grabbing whatever weapons you can. You can also grab the torch when you find it but going into the caves is technically unnecessary (given the items duplicate from the top floor to the caves). Either while you are at it or after you’ve obtained enough items you should start killing enemies.
Even though you are technically never in absolute danger — you can always leave the room when there’s an enemy you can’t handle — I still found it very easy to mess up and died multiple times just getting through the house. Hanging around a monster without killing it right away is usually death, and you often just end up going east-west-east repeatedly while you wait for a random roll of a room that doesn’t contain a monster.
The saving grace — and this game is far too miserable to play to say this saves the game, but at least it helps — is all you really need is points, and the game doesn’t care what monsters you kill to get those points. So you can kill the same monster more than once (you should pick up the item you use after you drop it) so if you don’t have a monster-item correspondence down, you just avoid killing that particular monster.
You could even technically just kill dwarves (via bare-handed method) and only pick up the key, eventually getting the right amount of score (something like 700).
On my way to enough points in my winning run. I never saw the torch, so it is good you technically never need to enter the caves.
Just to make things even more of a headache, even if you drop the correct item to defeat an enemy sometimes the game kills you anyway.
Exemptus valiantly figured this game out only a few months ago and has a full list. (Although it seems to indicate you need to kill one of each monster; I can confirm this is definitely not the case, it is just based on score.)
After all the mess above opening the cupboard magically works over a certain point threshold, but you still have to deal with opening the safe:
This is technically timed — you’ll start to get threatened if you stay trying to open the safe too long — but fortunately my old Mastermind reflexes came through.
After you do this all the objects in your inventory are randomly scattered through the house again. This includes the key you need to escape, so the best thing to do (assuming you know about the trick beforehand) is to drop the key before opening the cupboard. I did not know so I had to find out where the key went, which fortunately didn’t take too long.
Yes, this was absolutely a cavalcade of mysteriously bad game design decisions. I can understand with a lack of models to work from producing something like this in an attempt to produce a “generative” game, but the random monster appearance is utterly spastic and the fact correct items still don’t always work is utterly cruel; the bizarre “you can’t open the cabinet yet” was done with a gameplay goal in mind (“I want the player to fight the monsters”) but with zero clarity to the player that’s what’s going on.
It’s still interesting to have another instance of adventure-roguelike genre, which to be fair, has mostly been a cavalcade of terrible. I have a weird soft spot for Madness and the Minotaur but I still recognize pragmatically it is a mostly terrible game; other than that Lugi has been the only one I felt hit the mark by having a wide variety of possible objectives.
One last bit of strangeness in Africa Diamond before signing out — check out Exemptus’s map of the caves. You’ll notice it has a branch that I didn’t include.
Specifically, the duplication of the top floor in the caves is so extensive that if you’re in the same room as the stairs were, you can GO STAIRS (even though they aren’t in the room description). This gets you a whole new set of caves which duplicate the ground floor of the game, with each of the rooms using the same Caves description. This is truly odd and remarkable and might not even technically be a bug. Whoever BEND was tried to extend their abilities to the limit in order to fit 10K of memory on the Acorn Atom.
The source code with BEND 1982 at the end.
Renga in Blue 
Is this the first game you’ve featured to have justified text (as in, spaces padded so the last word touches the right side of the screen) or just the first one that I’ve noticed?
it’s the first one I remember!
Vampires succumb to a SILVER CRUCIFIX.
This sentence originally had a dangling “or” and I was going to ask, or what? and guess the garlic that is in the inventory screenshot… but your deleting that makes me wonder if the garlic doesn’t actually work on vampires here, and if not, what does it work on?
I originally thought the garlic worked but it just sometimes says you got lucky, which means I don’t think it actually did anything.
I wasn’t invested enough to figure out if there was real logic there or if you could scare a monster off with a ballpoint pen given the right roll.
Now there’s an image XD
I still cannot figure out whether the rooms replication effect is deliberate or an artefact of the programming (I would doubt the latter in almost every other platform, but it’s the Atom we’re talking about, where it’s difficult to write a “Hello world” without any side effects).
what’s really fun, at least in the “Stardot collection” version, is if you say N at the start to if it is your first run, it goes into almost a little art show
I would think it was trying to load a save game but I found no command for saving
What happens if you try to finish the game with the Africa Diamond from the caves? Does GO OUTSIDE work in the mirror-spot?
Odd. Under Atomulator 1.30 and the stardot collection v11 my setup behaves reasonably well. No unexpected art shows at least. As for the experiments, good questions; I’d like to know as well, but it was painful enough to dive into the game once! That said, I seem to remember that GO OUTSIDE did not work in the mirror spot, but my memory, like the Atom’s, has its own opinions.