I’ve finished the game. This link will read my posts in order.
The MZ-80K tape adjacent to the later MZ-700 version. From the Sharp MZ Software Archive.
My sequence was:
- conquering one bit where I had previously tried a verb correctly, but not on the sub-noun the game wanted, revealing a new area
- using an item from the new area to bust through the bricked-up door, but it’s pretty esoteric; this leads to the treasure-deposit room
- solving one final puzzle in the treasure-deposit room which is really esoteric
For the sub-noun issue, I warp back up to the bathroom with the gold taps.
I had tried TURN BATH with the notion of perhaps running the water (and to be more literal, RUN WATER) but was running into the generic refusal message so moved on. I was instead supposed to type TURN TAPS. (Which, sure, I guess the game suddenly wants to start referring to sub-nouns now! That will come back again shortly.)
LOOK TOWN advertises one of the co-author’s other games:
IT’S SO FAR! FOR A CLOSER LOOK YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY MEXICAN ADVENTURE!
I tried hard mucking about the roof to see if I could fly the broomstick anywhere, but no dice. In the process, though, I tried to BURN BROOMSTICK (well, at least it is a verb I knew works) and the game informed me I needed a draught in order to start a fire.
If you recall, the bricked door help mentioned a draught, so I brought the broom down and tried burning there:
There was no real coherent thought otherwise; I wasn’t solving a puzzle as much as solving a trail. With the door busted open I could enter the final room, which is a dungeon with a skeleton. LOOK SKELETON reveals a NOTEPAD, and looking at the notepad indicates the treasures go here.
Our task is to collect the house’s treasures and make them harder to find.
So I dropped the treasures I had (bottle of wine, gold ring, bracelet, book) and I was informed by SCORE that I had only 69 out of 100 points. I did a large search (more than an hour) across the house trying to wheedle out more treasures, including trying to unscrew the gold taps (since they are described as gold).
There was really only one treasure remaining, at it was there at the dungeon the whole time.
I don’t think there’s a “reasonable” way to solve this. I had the intuition something unreasonable was happening so I checked the source code. The only time I recall seeing a comparable puzzle was with Avventura nel Castello where I had to pick up a bone from a skeleton (even though a bone isn’t described).
You don’t pick up a bone. You pick up the skull. I combed over the source code and there’s no hint for this, and there’s no message that happens when you get the skull — it just lands in your inventory. You can then LOOK SKULL and find it has a golden bullet, which lands in the room you’re in (probably the dungeon).
Now typing SCORE confirms we have all 5 treasures and the win.
As I predicted, the source code includes a big pile of bespoke commands. I don’t recommend anyone coding a text adventure like this ever.
This screen is from the later MZ-700 version, which doesn’t change anything other than the starting room (you begin at the pond rather than the rock).
This is still fascinating in a historical sense because it might seem all the various tutorials we’ve seen (like the Ken Rose ones) are maybe being a little overmuch about the difficulty, but clearly here is a pair of authors who couldn’t conceive of a different way of handling a parser other than listing every single verb-noun combination a player might possibly type.
Except: remember, Secret Kingdom did have a decent parser! It must have come after this game. I think we can now assume the publishing order matches this ad listing’s order:
That is, the proper order is…
Game 1: Dark Star by A.J. Josey
Game 2: Mexican Adventure by Geoff Clark
Game 3: Haunted House by A.J. Josey and Geoff Clark
Game 4: Secret Kingdom by Geoff Clark.
…meaning I’ve been going in reverse order. (I figured out what the G. stood for as it gets listed with Mexican Adventure. Still not sure about Josey, but you’ll notice Dark Star is solely that author’s work.) After combing over the source code, I don’t think Colditz is connected (other than the Sharp programmers in general were clearly struggling to write a parser).
I weirdly had fun puzzling this out, but that’s mainly because Rob joined me in the comments to similarly take whacks at it, and I was thinking in a meta-sense of this being a mysterious artifact. I never got any sense of being in a haunted house. The game does try for random atmospheric messages and there’s even a bit where a ghost can steal your treasure if you try to wear the bracelet or drink the wine, but given the vast majority of what I typed in gave error messages I was not “engrossed” in a story sense, but rather as a historical challenge meant to be conquered.
Coming up next: kaiju.
Renga in Blue 
GAH!!!
<hangs head in despair>
Anyway, I kind of liked it! The parser is terrible, but it has some charm. I think I’ll try out the other Sharpsoft games now. Should they work with this emulator set-up, or is it more complicated than that?
By the way, there kind of was a clue for the ridiculous last treasure. If you use HELP in the dungeon, it says something like “USE YOUR HEAD! NUMBSKULL!”.
wow, that’s like a fake out where you think you have the sarcastic narrator from Strange Adventure, but it’s supposed to be a clue
re: running other games for MZ-80K
to work the emulator from scratch, press L and then press enter at the starting prompt. This will ask for a tape. Load the BASIC tape that should be in the directory package (BASIC-5025). You do Play from CMT menu and pick the file, and then press Play Button from the CMT menu (yes, Play loads the tape, Play Button is the actual button, it is weird, dev is Japanese so it might be a translation thing)
this will take a while (afterwards, I recommend dropping a save state so you don’t have to redo this step if you switch games)
once done, you’ll be able to start typing again. This time type LOAD
insert the tape you’re playing, same process as before except you need to use Fast Rewind before hitting the play button (this emulator doesn’t “reset” the rewind counter if you swap tapes, pressing Fast Rewind lets the emulator know you’re at the start again)
this will take another while
once done, you should be able to type RUN and hit enter to play the game
Sorry for necro-posting, but I’ve run into a weird issue emulating these games, and since you’ll be getting to the other Sharpsoft games soon enough, I thought I should mention it here:
After we played through Haunted House, I went ahead and tackled Mexican Adventure. I finished it a little while back, and am now playing Dark Star. The thing is, you eventually get to a situation in Dark Star where you have to specify button presses by entering “Press 1”, “Press 2”, etc. Weirdly, when I got to this point, I discovered that the number keys won’t work, neither the regular ones, nor the number pad! It just produces a beep sound and nothing is entered. This is in the MZ 700 version of the emulator, and I also tested the 700 version of Mexican Adventure, with the same results. Out of curiosity, I went back and tested this on Haunted House and Mexican Adventure in the 80k emulator (which is the one I played through it on), and the numbers don’t work in that either. This was not a problem in Haunted House or Mexican Adventure, since they didn’t require numeric inputs, and I guess you didn’t have that issue in Secret Quest either, but it’s made further progress in Dark Star impossible. But here’s the oddest part: The number keys work fine in Monitor when you first start the emulator, and in BASIC when you’ve loaded it up, just not in the games! I’ve tried everything I could think of in the emulator settings, but nothing has worked.
Anyway, sorry to bother you with this, but I just don’t know if it’s me being an emulator dunce, or if there’s actually an issue here…
I have nudged Sharpworks on Twitter about it, he’d be the person to know
I tested it myself and while MZ-80K lets you input numbers just fine, MZ-700 does not
which suggests to me – given the emulator is using very very similar codebase from the same author – that it isn’t an emulator bug
unfortunately while we have the mz-80k version of mexican adventure we don’t of dark star!
Thanks! Hopefully he can figure out a solution. The sad thing is that I’ve found Dark Star to be surprisingly enjoyable so far, definitely more so than Mexican Adventure.
he posted a video demonstrating that the same problem happens on real hardware
it isn’t the emulator
so the only way through is likely messing with the BASIC code (probably the custom input routine, not the fact the parser is wanting a number)
whoever did the MZ-700 port must not have tested it that well
One final update on this situation:
It definitely seems to be some weird issue with how the Sharpsoft games are interacting with the emulator, as I tested a few other games, including Cave Adventure and Mystery of Munroe Manor, and the numbers worked fine, whereas when I tried Secret Kingdom (not sure why I called it Secret Quest before), they didn’t.
After that, I surveyed the general emulator situation for the 700, and it seems the only other viable option is the older Japanese mz700win emulator. MAME looks painfull for this system, and there’s an old German emulator, but it no longer seems to be available. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get mz700win to work, as it wouldn’t recognize the font rom no matter what I did, and the instructions regarding the roms in general left me confused.
I’ll leave it there for now and move on to another game, as I’m sure you have better things to do with your time, but thanks again for checking it out.
Oops, I meant MESS when I said MAME, obviously.
Wow, that’s pretty bad. I’m sure there must have been a few unhappy customers back in the day!
Anyway, it seems like certain enthusiasts with coding skills enjoy tackling these sorts of bugs and making fixed/patched versions (you see a lot of that on CASA), so hopefully Sharpworks himself or someone else might choose to take it on. As I mentioned before, it actually seems like a pretty good game!
Thanks again for taking the time to check this out.
OMfG…
Thanks! Dark Star looks like it might be particularly painful (strict turn limits), so I’ll probably take a look at that one.