This post is mainly to announce that after an immense amount of work, a group at Gaming Alexandria (mainly gschmidl, ftb1979, bsittler, and eientei) have managed to repair the damage to the NEC PC-6001 version of Mystery House II to the extent that the second part is now playable. I have a version (with emulator) here. Just drag and drop one of the three save states onto the executable to play either part 1, 2, or 3.
The starting screen of the second part.
I did play through parts 2 and 3 but first I need to get some inside baseball out of the way, abstruse enough it won’t make sense unless you’ve read all my previous posts on Mystery House II. So much effort was expended trying to work things out it is at least worth recording as reference, especially because some pieces are still missing (like the first volume of the MZ-2000 version of the game).
Just which versions are out there?
To start, we can put together the information from the I/O Magazine ad I’ve shown already…
The first version, written by Dr. Moritani (the dentist) seems to have been for MZ-80B. The system Sharp sold had cassettes by default with floppy disks an optional purchase. The ad clearly states the “FD” version was by Moritani so that’s likely the original platform, meaning this was written without any kind of volume-splitting. The cassette version was then made by Ohyachi (computer store owner, and collaborator on Mystery House I). This is where there are two volumes that get listed as separate purchases. This is all confirmed by the catalog as well.
The MZ-2000 is extremely close to the MZ-80B so there was likely minimal work done to create a port; we do know they were sold separate, though.
From Giant Bomb, uploaded by bowloflentils.
As shown in an image from one of my earlier posts, the cassettes ended up also packaged together in a later printing, while floppy disk had MZ-80B, MZ-2000, PC-8801, and FM-8 (Fujitsu Micro 8).
There’s also copies of the game for FM-7 (shown below, and the FM-7 came out after the FM-8)…
…PC-6001 (our recovered one, although technically for the Mark II), Epson QC-10 (QX-10 in the West), and MSX. My playing sequence:
1.) I started with the MSX version from ARROW SOFT, which is not only dumped but has a fan translation into English. It is significantly changed from the other versions and can be treated as a different game.
2.) I then moved on to start the PC-6001 version — broken into three parts rather than two, although the “volume 2” tape contains parts 2 and 3. This turned out to have a corrupted tape and some damage over part 2.
3.) Because I had a copy of MZ-200 Vol 2, I switched to that version, starting on the second floor of the house. Unlike the NEC version it ends after part 2 and there are puzzle differences (which I’ll explain a little later).
A chart, just to keep everything straight:
Both the tapes and the program parts are called “volumes” but I tweaked the terminology to keep things clear. I have no idea the differences between the versions I haven’t touched (other than I highly suspect MZ-80B and MZ-2000 are quite close). Did someone care enough about the obscure Epson QC-10 to make a custom port with its own puzzles?
What changes were made in the NEC PC 6001 version?
The map looks the same at the start, but if you turn right, while formerly there was a slightly surreal elevator, taking you to a “garden” and a dark area with the safe/key-to-exit…
…the NEC version has a bedroom.
Turning south there’s a part with a floor that looks fragile, and you can KICK FLOOR in order to open it up. This will get used later.
Additionally the bed is next to what the game calls a RACK, which can be searched to find some tobacco and a matchbook (that was in a fireplace in the other version of the game).
The layout otherwise starts out the same, with a memo in a frame in the same position as before.
Different content, though. MZ-2000 here talked about setting a clock to 1 o’clock. We already got a clock setting in part 1 (which said to use 3 o’clock) and this spot has a clue for the safe instead.
The fireplace which previously had matches now has a rope.
Climbing up to the third floor is mostly the same (except the HATCH is now a DOOR). The windows which oddly give numbers when opened (corresponding to the safe) are mostly gone, except for one that just doesn’t open (we already got the code from the memo in the picture).
Still a SCOOP. One of the windows in the MZ-2000 version was straight ahead.
ADJUST TIME to 3 rather than 1.
PUSH BUTTON instead of PLAY MZ2000.
The MEMO at the end gives steps for digging, just like the MZ-2000 port.
However, the way to the garden previously in order to dig was the elevator. There’s no elevator this time. That rope from earlier can be tied to the balcony (which was just scenery before) in order to climb down.
The DIG GROUND mechanics work the same (no Microcabin logo this time) yielding the treasure. In order to escape, you need to take the rope (previously tied to the balcony) now over to the bedroom and the hole, and tie it there. If you try to go down without matches the game will ask if you have any (this is the same “enforce the world-state” trick we saw in part 1). Assuming you have them, you can go down and enter part 3.
Part 3 is very short. You are in the room with a hole and the rope, and need to get down in the cellar to get a key. You can go DOWN, the LIGHT MATCH to see in the darkness. There are five matches and they last a random amount of real time.
You can go west now — one-way trip — to the spot underneath the hole you previously busted way back in part 1. You can move a ladder and climb up to get out, but you need to grab the key first, which you can find by turning to the right to see a safe.
Using the code from memo 3. I assume the game forces you to stay in part 2 if you haven’t gotten the memo yet.
You still have a 2-item limit and you’re holding the box/jewel from the garden, so you need to ditch the matches to take the key. Basically, you need to a.) wait for the match to go out b.) LIGHT MATCH c.) CAST MATCH d.) grab the key and book it to the ladder while you can still see. (In the MZ version, casting the match automatically made it go out.)
This basically says now you’re wealthy, so you should buy more Microcabin software.
Is Isao Harada anybody?
Yes. He also worked for a NEC port of Dream Land, which is Dr. Moritani’s third game (from 1983, so we’ll see it sooner rather than later). His Mobygames list of credits is here although I don’t know how complete it is.
I do think it quite possible he worked on the (disk-based) PC-8801 version first, then had the same split-program issue as other Micro Cabin people did in order to get it onto cassette, except because he fiddled with removing the elevator (too Willy Wonka, I guess?) and giving the game a different ending section the game landed in 3 parts rather than 2.
My first new official update comes next week, as we embark on 1983 once more!
First off, a brief correction: The PC-6001 version I’ve been playing (at least up to a certain point, for reasons I’ll get into) is on tape, not disk, but everything on one tape. The files, found if you CLOAD multiple times, are
AUTO 1
MYS1
AUTO 2
MYS2 2
MYS2 3
where the double-auto files (meant to load on boot) suggest to me that this is the same copy as the two-tape version I mentioned last time, just someone copied everything together.
As far as why there’s MYS2 2 and MYS2 3, that’s because there’s three volumes! Or rather, there’s two tapes (each called a volume) and three program parts (each also called a volume) at the same time. That is…
Volume 1: has volume 1 on it
Volume 2: has volume 2 on it
Volume 2: also has volume 3 on it
…and all this took a long time to detangle. (Implicit thanks everywhere to the Gaming Alexandria discord, which helped out enormously.) I regret to inform you it gets worse, but let’s see what happens in gameplay context.
Disk from the FM-7 version via Oh! FM-7. I do not have access to this version. The screenshots make it look like it’s based on the Sharp/NEC map. I don’t know how the multiple volumes are handled.
Last time I left off with a cryptic message from a stairway about finding the entrance to the basement. Someone with eagle eyes might have spotted what to do next here, but in this case it was Kazuma Satou from the comments realizing that there was a map/hint page on Mobygames.
The basement and third floor are not shown.
The room in the lower left of 1F — where I found the book hiding the memo — also has a CARPET.
That double black line along the wall.
Some noodling about led me to MOVE CARPET, revealing a locked trapdoor.
This still isn’t enough to finish! You also need to USE HAMMER to bust open the door. Then you completely ignore the door for now and can leave up the stairs.
Trying to go down kills you, and I spent a while trying to survive going down before checking the stairs again.
That’s the end of Volume 1! Volume 2 is an entirely different program on an entirely different tape and doesn’t even carry any variables over. The game requests you reset the computer to move on.
The sequence in volume 1 was intended to get you to bust open a trapdoor before moving on. The reason this is important is that in volume 3 you return to the same room from below and the game assumes you’ve already busted the trapdoor (in a different kind of game, this might have a softlock because you didn’t prepare the trapdoor beforehand).
I want to re-iterate how completely odd and bizarre this is. I’ve never seen a game work this way; the closest I can think of is Savage Island (Part 1, Part 2) where there was an item you might be holding at the end of Part 1, and if you are holding the item you get one password, and if you are not holding the item you get a different password. Since the item is required to make progress in Part 2 early you can get softlocked from the previous game.
Earlier I mentioned “it gets worse” as far as the multi-part situation goes. You see, that NEC PC-6001 file? … is also corrupted. While the 3rd part of the game loads (you have found the jewel and are back on the first floor, now escape), there are damaged lines in part 2. In other words, to keep playing I had to switch computer systems over to the Sharp MZ-2000, where I have the second tape but not the first one. You start with no inventory, so the game assumes you’ve used CAST on the hammer or any other objects from the first floor.
(The Volume 1/2/3 situation still has yet another twist but let’s save that for the end.)
At least this version is likely adapted directly from the MZ-80B original.
The controls now go with the original “type verb and noun separate” system. It’s not as bad as I experienced with Mystery House 1 because there’s no screen swapping, although I quickly found reading memos and taking inventory to be cryptic until I got some source code assistance.
15230 IF D$=”ﾓﾁﾓﾉ”THEN12000
This line in the source code (which is protected from LIST and required shenanigans to break open) is the one that jumps to taking inventory. “ﾓﾁﾓﾉ” is Japanese for, essentially “belongings”, and makes a decent synonym for “inventory”, but is the only command in the game delivered in Japanese rather than in English. There is, fortunately, a function key (F3) which will type the same thing.
This screen will show objects on top (except the player isn’t holding any right now) but also is the only screen you can read memos from. You have to hit F4, which types out READ MEMO (as a whole command, not split!) and then pick the number of the memo. F5 types “RETURN” which will exit from this screen.
Now, a map:
I’ll save the elevator for last. Rotating west, going forward, and entering the door to the south, you get to a room with a picture. The picture has a memo.
The memo says the clock needs to be set to 1 o’clock for the door to open. (Remember back in Volume 1 of the NEC version of the game it said 3 o’clock. More on all that later.)
Going back to the starting position and north leads to a room with a fireplace. Searching the fireplace yields a match.
In the same “room” (it’s another 2 by 1 setup where you see across the long room) there’s a “RACK” partly underneath a “HATCH”. You can MOVE RACK so it now is fully underneath the hatch, then OPEN HATCH to get access to the third floor.
The third floor has what the game calls a SCOOP lying on the ground (shovel) and also windows that mysteriously open to reveal a number.
Just to be clear with a map:
To the north of where the shovel is there’s a rectangle on the wall that looks like it should have a door, but it isn’t. After a bit of struggle I came up with PUSH WALL which opens the passage.
The next room has a clock. This is where the first memo (set to 1 o’clock) comes into play, as you can ADJUST CLOCK and then say you want it at 1. This opens yet another secret passage, this time through the tiny door in the clock.
The next room (and last room of floor 3) has a computer, specifically an MZ-2000 in this version of the game.
RUN MZ2000 will print a memo that you can then take.
マイクロキャビン マーク カラ W ニ 2:S ニ 1
This indicates you’re supposed to start at the Microcabin logo and go west by 2 and south by 1. We’ll need this shortly. Let’s go outside by heading to the elevator.
The mechanics here are weird. You need to press and hold W to leave, or press and hold E to approach the buttons. No other keys work; you aren’t typing on a parser prompt. Wild inconsistency is the most consistent thing about this game.
There’s 3 buttons; the second one kills you, the other two are helpful.
One of them takes you to a garden outside. You need to specify DIG GROUND, at which point the game will ask you for how many steps west and south; this is where the memo comes into play.
The inventory limit of 2 still applies, so you need to cast off one of your items after doing this in order to get the BOX, or TRUNK.
If you try to then saunter through the exit — and you can go down the stairs, you just can’t walk around the first floor otherwise — you’ll find it is locked. You also need a key, which is where the other button on the elevator comes into play.
This leads to darkness, which you can dispel with LIGHT MATCH. (According to the source code, the amount of time the match is lit is tracked in real time. This is very rare for a turn based game but we’ve seen it once in a while, like in how Devil’s Island you needed to wait in real time for a guard to show up.)
The safe lets you enter the 7474 from the window (rather, ADJUST / SAFE, 7, 4, 7, 4) revealing a key inside.
Again you might need to worry about your inventory limit. If you got the BOX first you’re in trouble because you can’t discard the match! The best order is to do the key first and then get the box.
With the key and box in and (with possibly some trouble as mentioned in the caption) you can now officially saunter outside to a win.
With scrolling text.
Now, you may be wondering — hey, Mr. Blog Author, didn’t you say something about needing to bash open a hatch with a hammer in volume 1, how did that come into play? And what about the hole with the rope? Yes indeed: it turns out the MZ version of the game only has two volumes and whatever happened in volume 1 must be different from the NEC version, despite it looking like the same game from the video. I could technically try starting in volume 3 of the NEC version and beating it from there, but I am honestly fine passing for now. (The good folks at Gaming Alexandria are still trying to work out how to rescue the data from the tape for NEC volume 2. I’ll keep everyone posted. My theory is a divergence at the very end allowing for the third volume.)
The start of Volume 3.
I think the multi-volume gameplay mess demonstrates a case of “flying too close to the sun” that many of our authors have suffered, where they need to follow-up their previous game with something more ambitious. (As touted in the ad, “the program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.”) Still, I found it interesting how reasonable the MZ (volume 2) version of the game was relative to everything else I’ve seen: the only hard part is realizing, for example, you’re looking at a HATCH on the screen and need to apply the parser accordingly. I also got stuck a while figuring out how to work the elevator given it doesn’t even use the parser! So our original author-dentist seems to have kept to reasonable ambitions (apart from the volume-splitting) but the later people who made ports started to get unreasonable, like with the carpet puzzle on NEC or the confusing design elements of the MSX version.
Mystery House II running on a Sharp MZ-80B2 (a slight variant of the MZ-80B, the original platform for the game). Via bowloflentils.
Yes, I arise from my slumber for at least a little while. This is the sequel to Japan’s first graphical adventure game, using the same first-person-with-directions view as the previous game. (If this isn’t ringing bells, you probably want to read my posts on the game first. The important thing to emphasize is that despite the name and opening graphic clearly coming via the Roberta Williams Mystery House, the Japanese game entitled Mystery House goes in an entirely different direction in both gameplay and content, and the sequel follows suit.)
I have already technically finished Mystery House II in one of its ports — the MSX version, which has an English translation patch — but I had enough disappointment that I mentioned I would return to tackle the NEC PC-6001 port, which I knew from testing was very different.
The situation turned out to be even more complicated than I expected.
“Mystery House is now 200% more powerful … The program size has now doubled, making the adventure even more exciting.” From I/O Magazine, May 1983.
Parsing the ad above, it mentions versions for cassette selling for 3800 yen and for disk selling for 9800 yen. The big catch is that cassette (due to size) was sold as volume 1 and volume 2. In other words, this game was split originally into two entirely separate parts. Volume 1 involves the ground floor (and possibly the basement below); Volume 2 involves the upper floors. You can’t get to the upper floors without finishing everything below, and the way this is enforced is extremely cryptic (I thought for a while I was running across a bug, for reasons you’ll discover).
The PC-6001 version that I did my playing has all the pieces on one tape, but I also have (with the help of the Gaming Alexandria discord and gschmidl) a copy of Volume 2 (and only Volume 2) for Sharp MZ-2000. The “volume 2” version of the game starts on the upper floor of the House; if you walk down to the ground floor, you can only see the room at the bottom of the stairs (identical to the first part of the game) but can’t walk anywhere.
We have seen a trick like this before, with Robert Arnstein’s Haunted House from way back in 1979, as published by Radio Shack. It was made when 16k wasn’t quite as common for TRS-80 so it was stuffed into 4k instead, meaning to get a little more content there’s a tape swap upon arriving upstairs (and the trip is one-way).
There was a cassette version of PC-6001 as well, except both volumes were sold together. Via eBay.
This is very different from the MSX version which had quite a bit of trekking up and down — made painful by an inventory limit of two. The inventory limit carries on here but there’s less space to travel around in. I’m still quite stuck, though, and this is without a walkthrough to consult this time.
The opening graphic is still essentially cribbed from Roberta Williams.
The NEC PC-6001 version is fortunately like the FM-7 version of Mystery House 1 in how it controls. You type commands in regular English VERB NOUN form; this is unlike the MZ versions which have you type each as a separate line. If you are facing a direction like EAST typing the same direction will move forward; if you aren’t facing that direction it will turn you that way. Chronologically Gaming managed to land a copy of the MZ version with volume 1 so you can watch some of the opening of that version here:
It has a major difference you can see by going NORTH, turning EAST, walking EAST, and then turning NORTH.
That’s a MEMO on the ground, not present in the MZ version. You can TAKE MEMO and then READ MEMO, at which point the game prompts you for a number (there are memos 1 and 2 at least, I think up to 4).
That is
メモをさがせ
ちかしつのいりぐちにきをつけろ !!
2Fへまわれ
Search for the memo.
Be careful of the entrance to the basement!!
Go to the second floor.
Just to reinforce the idea I’ve mentioned before that the “VERB NOUN” form is strange for Japanese, from left to right, the first line メモをさがせ can be parsed literally as メモ (memo) を (is the object of action) さがせ (action is search for, imperative form).
Heading in further…
…the first room is a kitchen. Of the items to the south, the only one I’ve been able to refer to is a REFRIGERATOR which has a CUP. To the north is a CABINET, although rather than OPEN CABINET you’re supposed to type SEARCH CABINET.
Both the CUP and CABINET are part of the later MSX game; the TOWEL was not part of it, but the KNIFE did get used for an identical purpose to this game.
Before going on, I should point out while the CUP was referenced in the Japanese text that went with the picture, the CABINET wasn’t, and of course translations can differ so even when at item gets named like the cup was it can be a pain to figure out the English word to type in the parser. Fortunately, the game has a HELP command that gives a fair amount of the needed words:
The game is written in BASIC so normally a list could also be obtained via the method of listing the source code, but the game has some sort of memory-protection preventing this. There’s an emulator (iP6+) that allows dumping the memory into a file, and I used this while the game was on to get a 100% complete list of understood words.
Moving on, to the west is a 2-section room of the type seen multiple times in the original Mystery House.
Trying to ADJUST CLOCK (like was possible with the MSX game) gets the message that the clock is broken.
Attempting OPEN WINDOW on the first window (the one to the east) just gets the response that it won’t open; the window after is subtly different:
“Because the window latch is so stiff, it’s difficult to open.”
USE KNIFE works here. I complained about this in the MSX version being arbitrary. The text is a strong clue; the text wasn’t quite so explicit in that version.
After this I dropped the knife because of the stringent inventory limit of only 2 items at a time. It goes back to the cabinet (by “magic”) if you need it again. The verb the game uses for dropping items is CAST.
The scene here doesn’t let you turn; you can only go SOUTH which will put you back in the house. The hammer is used in the MSX version to bust a hole in a wall and there’s also a SCOOP (shovel) later which can be used to dig.
Moving on, south of the two-space room with the clock, there’s a four-way door intersection with stairs.
The south is the front door (locked). Trying to go east leads to a hole going down…
…and trying to go down kills you. (I assume the ROPE mentioned in the object list is used later.) Just like the outside section with the hammer the scene here is “locked” and you can’t turn.
Heading west instead leads to a room with windows to the west and south (OPEN WINDOW just gets “NO!”) and some books to the north.
When trying to TAKE BOOK you are prompted with which book you mean; the game wants you to type a digit from 1 through 6.
Being prompted for a digit. My first time through here I had the CUP and HAMMER which was too many inventory objects, and I was confused why the game wasn’t letting me take a book.
Each book is identical except for one (chosen randomly at the start of the game, I’ve had it be book 2 or book 4), which includes an extra surprise.
Memo 2 says to enter a door at 3 o’clock (3時のとびらをくぐれ). I assume this matches the MSX puzzle of setting the clock, but as I indicated earlier, ADJUST CLOCK just says it is broken, so something is different in the sequencing.
Finally let’s get around to those stairs. Trying to go up them right away, the game asks if you’ve found the second memo. Trying to go up them after finding the second gets the message
ちかしつのいりぐ ちを、あつけましたか?
or something like “did you figure out how to get into the basement?” (Maybe? I could use a Japanese expert to confirm here.)
I mentioned earlier I thought maybe this was a bug; I had no idea why going up stairs would provoke these kinds of “hint” messages (first indicating to find a memo, then pointing to the basement). Once I realized this was a “split” game (unlike the MSX version) the logic clicked into place. It also clicked into place why the MSX version might have changed things around; I can say that the “view” still is far superior in this game as you can see what’s going on to the left or right. You can even see changes in the distance; going back to the two-square room, notice how while looking west you can see the window open to the far right, which is not a detail the MSX version had at all.
I’m technically not on the hook for finishing this version of this game; I’m satisfied enough knowing why the different versions came out the way they did. I’m still interested if anyone has any helpful suggestions for progress. I have a copy of the game here; boot the emulator, pick option 2 for BASIC 32k, say you want 2 pages, type CLOAD, right click and pick Tape->Insert followed by the Mystery House file, then type RUN.
There is, first off, what even “counts” as a personal computer; if we bypass all that argument to the minimum, the first personal computer was Simon, which could not be purchased in a store but where plans for making one were printed in the magazine Radio-Electronics starting in October 1950. It was the brainchild of Edmund Berkeley (co-founder of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery) and cost north of several hundred dollars to make (in 2025 currency, at least $3500). It only had 32 bits of memory.
Based on the price, having the plans be meted out in a magazine, and having the entire thing require self-manufacture: it did not have much historical impact. It was, however, only Berkeley’s first attempt bringing something resembling computing to the home, as he had a much better price point with the Geniac (co-designed with Oliver Garfield) of $20 in 1950s money.
Eventually, this sort of “physical computer” was made even cheaper at $5 with the Digi-Comp I, a finite state machine powerful enough it also has been dubbed “the first personal computer”.
Certainly both devices could be programmed as if they were real computers; both devices included guides to programming Nim, an obligatory rite of passage for any 50s/60s computer.
These later devices had relatively widespread use — the Digi-Comp I had an estimated 100,000 in sales — unlike the Simon which remained a novelty. All these products were the logical outgrowth of Berkeley’s attempts to reach the masses with computing, which started even before Simon, in 1949, with his book Giant Brains, or Machines that Think.
These new machines are important. They do the work of hundreds of human beings for the wages of a dozen. They are powerful instruments for obtaining new knowledge. They apply in science, business, government, and other activities. They apply in reasoning and computing, and, the harder the problem, the more useful they are. Along with the release of atomic energy, they are one of the great achievements of the present century. No one can afford to be unaware of their significance.
This is all relevant for today’s story…
THREAD 2: Joseph Weisbecker
…as one of the people who read the book was Joseph Weisbecker, where (according to his daughter Joyce), “he saw for the first time what an electronic computer could do, but, more importantly, how it worked. Binary logic, flip-flops, switching circuits – very simple elements combined in subtle, clever ways resulted in surprisingly sophisticated behavior from a machine.”
Joseph Weisbecker was only a teenager when he read the book; by age 19 (in 1951) he had built his own Tic-Tac-Toe machine. During the 50s he joined RCA, not only working on chip and memory design projects but making lower-end educational toys (akin to the Digi-Comp) intended to bring computers to the masses. He had a special contract with RCA that let him sell his inventions to outside companies, like Think-a-Dot (sold by E.S.R, same company who made the Digi-Comp).
He was in the odd position of being involved with a vast number of the RCA computing initiatives all the way through the 1970s but also being ideologically opposite in a way; RCA cared mostly about large business where Weisbecker kept the flame alive for smaller computing. He put forward a proposal for mini-computers in 1960 (a level between giant mainframes and personal-computers) that was ignored (when this market emerged with the DEC PDP-8 in 1964, it became huge). Where this really became clear is when he went on to make his own personal computer system called FRED, developing it from his home in New Jersey.
Knowing RCA’s apathy to the idea, he didn’t even bother pitching FRED (which eventually became the basis of the 1802 chip) until after RCA had a collapse of their mainframe computer business in 1971; according to Joyce Weisbecker he’d already been working on it for two years on the side. Later in the 70s he bypassed RCA entirely and wrote a series for Popular Electronics in 1976 and 77 that laid out the design for a personal computer, the Cosmac Elf, with the full 1802 chip design. This computer was essentially the fully-developed version of the FRED.
It isn’t like the 1802 would have gone to waste without the personal computer connection; the chip was the first CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) chip and consequently had low noise and low power consumption. Both are essential aspects in spacecraft and so an 1802 has found its way both in the Galileo probe launched in 1989 (giving a close-up view of Jupiter and its moons) as well as the famous Hubble space telescope launched a year later (see image at the top of this post).
Mosaic of Europa, from the Galileo probe.
The 1802 also found its way into the short-lived RCA Studio II console, off and on the market in a year. It is notable for having none other than Joyce Weisbecker (as quoted earlier) implement some games, making her one of the first female programmers in videogames.
For our purposes, the important thing to take away is that despite RCA being heavily corporatized, the Cosmac Elf was in a way “liberated” from it, as part of the movement to bring computing to the masses. Speaking of bringing computing to the masses…
THREAD 3: Tom Pittman
…we now need to move from New Jersey to California and the Homebrew Computing Club of Menlo Park.
Are you building your own computer? Terminal? T V Typewriter? I/O device? or some other digital black-magic box?
Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?
If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project, whatever…
They were founded quite shortly after the launch of the Altair computer, another candidate for “first personal computer” (more properly here, first commercially successful personal computer). While plenty of hobbyists had already made their own systems through arcane means, here was a computer kit that seemed to break things open, 256 bytes of default memory and all–
If it was even possible to get a set. The makers, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) out of New Mexico, had a story featured in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics; it was a Hail Mary by the founder, Ed Roberts, after they got their calculator business destroyed by Texas Instruments and friends (it cost more to make a ship a calculator than it did to buy it). They were not prepared for the influx of orders, some made to products mentioned that didn’t even exist yet.
Steve Levy’s book Hackers mentions how one person (Steve Dompier) drove all the way to Alberqueue and “had left the office only after Roberts had given him a plastic bag of parts he could begin working with, and over the next couple of months more parts would arrive by UPS, and finally Dompier had enough parts to put together an Altair with a serial number of four.”
This atmosphere of just touching the edge of the technological revolution was when the Homebrew Computing Club kicked off in the garage of Gordon French, co-founder of the group with Fred Moore. They both had links through the People’s Computing Company which for a brief time had one of the only working Altairs at the time (sent directly to the director, Bob Albrecht, who sang its praises in their newsletter) and that Altair landed in the garage for the first meeting.
We arrived from all over the Bay Area — Berkeley to Los Gatos. After a quick round of introductions, the questions, comments, reports, info on supply sources, etc., poured forth in a spontaneous spirit of sharing. Six in the group already had homebrew systems up and running. Some were designing theirs around the 8008 microprocessor chip; several had sent for the Altair 8800 kit.
Even with hardware there was the problem of software; coding in assembly was quite error-prone and slow, and the PCC already had good experience with using BASIC. Salvation seemed to come in the form of a version of BASIC made by Paul Allen and Bill Gates (with Monte Davidoff) which was sold by MITS…
…but it started selling at $397, and eventually landed on (after price reduction!) a price of $200, far more than what many of the computer enthusiasts were used to paying for software ($0).
A “Caravan” also known as the “MITS-Mobile” was travelling from town to town demonstrating the wonders of the Altair, and in June 1975 the Caravan arrived in Palo Alto, California.
The Homebrew Computer Club visited and there was an (early, buggy) version of Allen/Gates/Davidoff BASIC running on one of the computers, expanded to 4K. “Someone” swiped a paper tape which turned out to be a copy, which eventually landed in the hands of Steve Dompier, and from there this copy spread to the community.
All this led to this to the “Open Letter to Hobbyists” printed in the newsletter of the Homebrew Computing Club, February 1976, written by Bill Gates, outlining how it seemed nearly everyone had the pirated BASIC, and given the numbers of how with royalties paid, their time spent developing the product was “worth less than $2 an hour”.
Many hobbyists groused about this; a follow-up letter in a later issue opined that perhaps Gates was directing his ire at the wrong people, and that
I’m sure that if I were MITS, I’d be chuckling all the way to the bank over the deal I got from you.
Some of the Homebrew Computer Club decided the best response was to make their own BASIC. Tom Pittman, in particular, had been a member since the first meeting, and he was one of those who had made his own computer prior to the Altair — using the Intel 4004 chip, with only 4 bits as opposed to the 8-bit chips that came after (the 8008 which was used in the Canadian MCM/70 and the French Micral N, and the 8080 used in the Altair). He took up the challenge. While not the first to do so, Tom Pittman wanted to try charging for it, but a nominal fee only:
Gates was moaning about the ripoffs, and people were saying, ‘If you didn’t charge $150, we’d buy it.’ I decided to prove it.
Tiny BASIC was a variation of BASIC developed to be as simple as possible to fit in small-capacity computers; Pittman made his BASIC conform to the Tiny BASIC standard (and then added in some extra just because he could), and importantly, only charged $5. Rather than for the Altair this was for a different chip (the Motorola 6800) and he eventually sold the interpreter to a company for $3,500 (while retaining the rights to sell to $5 to hobbyists).
The 6800 wasn’t his passion, though, nor the MOS Technology 6502 he also wrote Tiny BASIC for (even though the 6502 showed up in everything from the Apple II to the BBC Micro to the Nintendo Entertainment System). The chip he truly loved was the 1802.
…the microprocessor is even more elegant than Joe Weisbecker intended. This microprocessor is so good that even RCA is not really aware how good it is. The 1802 is a complete and symmetrical microprocessor.
The Elf II was the commercial-kit version of the original Cosmac Elf design, sold a year later for $100. Source.
And now we finally get to why the threads all tie together, and why they are here on All the Adventures. Pittman’s book of Tiny BASIC programs includes Tiny Adventure, source for a full adventure game.
The instructions specifically mention Crowther/Woods Adventure “provided the inspiration”, but this game has significant differences. It feels very alien to play.
INTERLUDE
Some quick notes if anyone else wants to try this out in an “authentic” way. You need a Cosmac Elf emulator; I used Emma 02. Under File -> Configuration -> Load I picked Netronics Tiny Basic -> Serial I/O and then bumped the clock speed up slightly before starting the emulator (I used 6.5, any farther and BASIC has trouble loading).
I then took the source code for Tiny Adventure, copied the whole thing to clipboard, and pasted it to the emulator screen. This is very slow. I let it run in the background for 15 minutes before it was finished, and then played. There’s some “save” buttons on the emulator which I would assume makes the process faster thereafter but I was getting corruptions trying to get them to work, so I had to cut and paste every single time I was starting the emulator anew (which given this game took me multiple days to beat … well, let’s just say I feel like I was getting the authentic 70s/80s experience).
I tried finding another BASIC interpreter that would work, but even the one marked as TinyBASIC compatible gave me issues. I think there are some unique aspects to the Elf implementation of BASIC that haven’t been ported over. (Despite there being a “standard”, there are quite a few variants as discussed here.) I have no doubt there’s ways to clear up the issue but playing on a historical emulator gave the 1981 flavor, and so worked for my purposes.
THE GAME
Tiny Adventure is set in a fantasy world. There is no quest given. (“…unlike the original game, TA keeps no score; you play for the pleasure of exploring, or set your own goals.”) There isn’t even a specific treasure goal mentioned. We are just told to wander.
So far that’s unusual but not shockingly so, although if you study the instructions above carefully, they also specify you are only allowed to carry one item at a time in your hands. You can store items in your knapsack, but you have to juggle items and put them in and out again if you are trying to use something that’s stored.
Commands are not given in a regular parser fashion. Initial letters are used instead of words. (Usually. Often the game gets fussy if you go past one letter, sometimes it doesn’t.) There’s Take, Putdown, Keep (put in knapsack), Go, Look, Inventory, Help, Open, Close, Attack, Drink.
Look and go do not work like you normally expect. This game involves relative direction. Not only that, it involves relative direction where the paths you travel along don’t necessarily go straight back and forth. This is absolutely unprecedented so let me clarify.
In a game we played recently, The Maze, while it had relative direction, it also gave a first-person view of a maze so it wasn’t confusing. Still, it meant that rather than going north, south, east, or west, the directions were generally left, right, and forward (with “A” for “turn around”). The “tank controls” that happened in the late 90s for some games like Resident Evil were a similar concept.
There’s also been relative direction with text-only games but it has been much rarer. Mystery Mansion had the inside of the mansion start out with relative directions until you found a compass; you’d see in the room description what was to the left, forward, and right, and if you turned to the right and went forward, you would expect to return the way you came by turning around 180 degrees and moving forward again.
Map from Mystery Mansion, showing turning right and going forward, followed by turning around and going forward. The design on this part of the map is in a grid to make this a little easier to manage. It still was a hassle to play.
Tiny Adventure has relative direction, and one-way exits, and directions that turn. It took me a very long time to work out what was going on. An example from the very start of the game:
Essentially, what happened above is
a.) I went forward from the starting room. (G F = “go forward”, and the game requires you to use letters like that)
b.) I used LOOK to turn to the left twice. (L L = “look left”, which both turns the player and describes what is ahead of them, it took me a long while to even realize LOOK doubled as a turn command)
c.) I went forward again, landing me in an entirely different room (G F), except it doesn’t appear to be that way and the only way to realize this issue is to rotate around all four directions and spot something is different.
You might also expect the turning-passage to rotate the direction the player is facing, but no, if you’re facing “north” you’ll still stay facing north no matter what when you arrive at the next location. In the end this makes things easier to map but it was difficult for me to realize this was how the game was working. (You can imagine a player sashaying sideways as their head stays fixed in the same direction.)
To make a map, upon arriving at a new room I would “L R” (look right) four times to get a description of what was in each direction, notating all four on the map. To move around, in order to be careful, I always looked in the direction I wanted and did G F (“go forward”); while you can go back, left, etc. and essentially skip a step, I found it extremely easy to get disoriented if I did any shortcuts.
Perhaps the issue could be mitigated with dropping items? Alas no: there is, for example, a rock to the “west” of the start, where the same rock is in two rooms at once. I think the idea is the rock is equidistant “between” them so the rock could be taken at either place, but goodness the game is already confusing enough as it is. For extra inconsistency, there’s also items you can also see while looking in a particular direction.
I tried my best to map the outside but I honestly gave up trying to make it accurate and just made it accurate enough for me to get through. The really important object on the outside is the sword, which you can use to whack at the two enemies (dragon and troll).
The “fall” drops you in a dark place and I never got around to experimenting with the lantern there.
There’s a cottage with a locked door; the way to get inside is to open the window.
I gave up here on any kind of tracking of left/right. Only the connectivity is accurate. I was making full spins every time I stepped in a new room.
The starting room (bedroom) has a chest with keys, as shown in an earlier screenshot. You can also go in farther to find a flask of “dragon’s tears” and a “lantern”. (The dragon’s tears turn the player invisible. I never found a good place to use them, but since this game is a language tutorial with no set goal the author likely was just tossing in what he thought was neat.)
Down some stairs is a wine cellar with a locked door; using the keys from the bedroom on the door leads to a tunnel. (I’m making this all sound straightforward, but I didn’t find the keys right away because of the look-relative-position issue — I didn’t realize until very late it applied to a chest that could hold an object.)
At the far end of the tunnel is a dragon. If the dragon is sleeping it is easy to dispatch with a sword. According to the source code the dragon can be awake (and wander between rooms) but I never experienced that.
Part-way up the tunnel is another locked door leading to a “troll’s den”. There is a “maiden” in the den that you can rescue.
Another exit in the tunnel leads to a cave with an axe (presumably an alternate weapon — again weird for a regular game but not for a tutorial one), and then out to an island with a boat. When I reached the island the game crashed.
Again, the game gives no specific goal; I figured killing the troll and rescuing the maiden was good enough for me, but the book gives some interesting suggestions:
Can you rescue the maiden and her jewels without killing the troll (leave him locked in his den)? What is the least number of turns to do this?
There are two ways into the dragon’s lair, but you cannot get back out by one of them. Can you find it?
Can you discover what the “magic dragon tears” do for you? Can you undo it? Can you get more, after you use them up?
This is a hard one: If you get lost in the forest, can you get out? Hint: You need to head off in the direction of the ravine, but you must get your bearings before you get lost. Crashing through the underbrush of the forest tends to get you turned around, and you usually end up going around in circles.
Once you solve the forest problem, you might want to take the maiden on a moonlight boat ride around the island. Watch out for the riptide!
How many turns does it take you to visit every place? There are 17 places in all, counting both ends of the tunnel as one place. Usually you can tell you’re in a different place if the scenery is different, or if something you Putdown is no longer visible.
The troll will under certain circumstances, wander around on his own. Can you coax him into the bedroom? Harder yet, can you lock him in the bedroom without the maiden being there to look on?
The relative-movement system is so much like wading through sludge I’m not going to make an attempt at these, but others are welcome to try. That does leave one open question I am intrigued by…
How did this happen?
…by which I mean, why did what is essentially tutorial code in a book end up being designed like it was from an alternate universe? (Not just the movement style, but the lack of goals, and the inventory where you can only hold one item at a time and need to specifically say you want to stuff items in your backpack.) I think there’s some flavor of The Hobbit here (made by a quartet of computer scientists) where seeing how systems play out was considered more interesting than any kind of destination. Regarding relative movement, though, there’s a strong hint in the book:
One common complaint I’ve heard from several people who played this game is that it does not follow standard Euclidean geometry. That is not true. A map (on a flat piece of paper) was drawn of the area before a single line of code was written, and it is faithful to the map. What happens is that in crawling, climbing, or otherwise moving from one place to another, you got turned around, and the way out may not be behind you. Or, the divisions between places (such as rooms) may not fall on cartesian boundaries. This is true to life, and the game is consistent.
That is, the author was trying to create a modeled universe, again with an engineer/computer science bent, and if the player doesn’t have a compass, of course they would be confused and turned around sometimes! And of course you realistically wouldn’t be holding that much, just like a real person! This game was written with the realism-model approach without the consideration that because we are being conveyed the model via text, no matter what happens there is an element of unrealism anyway. Certainly my stumbling around a tunnel felt very different than any kind of being lost in real life I’ve ever experienced; this game is what would be like if you completely bypassed all thought of player convenience. As he states on his own webpage, he “doesn’t play games”; this was a true outsider work.
Which is interesting! I feel like I stumbled across a microcosm of innovation that started and ended where it landed. Pittman is still around and working in computers, but after one more game (Grand Slam Tennis for the Emerson Arcadia 2001) he went on to teach and write about compiler design, work on an automated Bible translation project, and finally (in the present day) teach programming to middle and high school students.
Coming up: I’m taking a break for the remainder of June! Sort of. I have a number of behind-the-scenes things to finish, including some posts that won’t show up until a future date (mystery!). I can say for now the game I have next on my list when I return is a graphical game for Apple II.
CREDITS NOTE: Very special thanks to Kevin Bunch, who is working on a book on RCA and graciously shared some of his research. If you’d especially like to hear him talk about the RCA Studio II at length, he did an interview with the Hagley Museum you can find here.
Renga in Blue 
