Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Robert S. French is another one of the teenaged computer experts (like Stepka with Castle Fantasy, and Goodman with Building of Death) that wrote one adventure game amidst their tech-savvy early life and went on to prominence in a field other than games. In Mr. French’s case he has his name on 18 different patents related to parallel computing and now works at SETI in astronomy research. His most recent paper he lists as Orbits and Resonances of the Regular Moons of Neptune.

From Robert’s own web page he lists this period — prior to starting a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at MIT — as working at Various Companies from Louisville, Kentucky.

Implemented accounting and inventory software for several companies. Managed a small programming department at a mail-order company. Developed a new BASIC interpreter that was sold with the ChromaTRS color graphics board for the TRS-80. Developed dozens of utilities and games for the TRS-80 that were sold commercially. Developed some of the first shareware for the Amiga, including a well-regarded Mandelbrot set exploration system. Tutored students in programming concepts.

There were a number of “color conversions” for the basic black-and-white TRS-80, including one from a company in Canada sold in 1979, although the most prominent was ChromaTRS, which started being sold for Model I and Model III computers in 1982.

Ad from Basic Computing, December 1983.

French’s contribution was writing CHROMA BASIC. From the manual:

CHROMA BASIC is a new program for use with a CHROMAtrs (T.M.} COLOR ADD-ON. Included in the CHROMA BASIC program are many, easy-to-use, graphics commands that can either be written into any Basic program or used independently.

His heavy familiarity with machine code interfaces explains a bit of technical oddity to today’s game, Strange Adventure, rather optimistically entitled Adventure #1 (there was no Adventure #2). In order to run it you need to first run an assembly language file which stays in memory (and seems to handle some parser aspects) before loading a BASIC file to run the game. You also need to crank the memory to 64560 when prompted for “Memory Size”. (I needed help from the trs80gp Discord group to puzzle this out, and George Phillips — one of the trs80gp co-authors — worked out the issue. Thanks!)

Regarding the “American Software Co.” label, Mr. French sold some other software by this name, mainly arcade clones.

It is, as the instructions say, another treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures. This time there’s more than one, and the first one is in the very first room of the game.

Typing GET JEWEL has the game respond I DON’T SEE IT HERE which isn’t a great first impression. You’re supposed to GET SICKLE and then CHOP TREE.

THE JEWEL HAS FALLEN OUT OF THE TREE.

And that’s the only treasure I’ve seen so far. I’m stuck pretty early, in one case almost surely on a parser issue, with other puzzles I’m not sure. Here’s the lay of the land so far, zoomed out:

There’s a “jungle path” that passes through, marked in green; you start on the far east and there are “branches” along the way.

The first branch has a crowbar and a sponge out in the open, and a cryptic note.

This area also has some quicksand that doesn’t kill you right away, so it might be a puzzle, or it might just be a time-wasting trap.

I haven’t fully caught the vibe yet which option (ignore, or it is a puzzle) I should expect.

The next area has traffic you can kill yourself on…

…and then there’s a dead end. You can drop down a hole to find a rope (and no verb I’ve tried lets me use the rope to get back) and a magic word on a wall.

I have yet to try this in every single room, but I worry the game might be coded so you have to see the word before it works.

Finally, trying to go farther west forces you to cross a stream with leeches. The leeches bite you and after enough time the bites become infected and you die.

Fortunately, there’s a cave just past the stream with with SOLARCAINE ANTISEPTIC that ought to work. Unfortunately, no verb I’ve tried has worked for using the bottle. What I did discover is that the verb is a two-letter parser; that is, if you type DRINK BOTTLE the game turns it into DR BO, thinks you meant DROP BOTTLE, and the bottle now appears on the screen, confusing someone (like myself) who didn’t realize the parser limits yet). And yes, I realize the antiseptic ought to be applied topically, but I haven’t found a command that actually does that.

Also, if you go deeper into the cave and try to do any command, you trip over a rock and die, presumably due to lack of light.

My attempt at making a verb list at the moment is consequently an absolute mess:

I can tell easily, for instance, that WEAR is being parsed as WEST and RESET is being parsed as READ. However, I’m not clear about “CL” — the game gives a vague response, so it might be CLEAN (especially given the sponge) but maybe it is CLOSE instead? I’ll have to keep investigating. “SM” on any object I’ve tried says that the object is not a door, but is SMASH the most logical verb then? I could of course plunge into the source code but I’m not at that level of desperation yet, even though I have the nagging feeling the bottle solution might involve an unmentioned noun (that is, something like CURE BITES even though the BITES aren’t given as a specific target).