(Continued from my previous posts.)
I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pitch this for now. If there’s a future version with save games (or at least where the frequency of knife attacks is greatly reduced!) and perhaps less bugs I can take another swing. (ICL’s Quest which I also bailed on has had recent progress, so it isn’t impossible even given the circumstances of being on an unusual platform written in NORD-FORTRAN where we don’t have the source!)
Full setup for playing SVHA Adventure on real hardware, via Ronny Hansen.
Regarding bugs, I ran across some erratic text messages, including one that made me unsure if I was even doing the right thing or not. The snake that got chased off by the bird makes a reappearance in SVHA Adventure, and by scooping the bird back up again I was able to get past where the snake was lurking:
You’re at bottom of long flight of steps.
(This is right after getting out of Witt’s End by going southwest and reaching a new area.)
S
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. You are on top of long flight of steps going down and north. There is a strong oak door leading south, with no handle or key hole on this side of the door.
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
You’re at top of long flight of steps.
OPEN SESAME
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
Note that OPEN SESAME (prompted by the hints about Aladdin, as suggested by bananathoroughly in the comments) gives an absolutely blank prompt, as opposed to any kind of feedback if you’ve done something right or wrong. Other words don’t have the same sort of response…
ABACADARA
I don’t understand that!
SHAZAM
Good try, but that is an old worn-out magic word.
…which makes me quite worried a bug is interfering with the act working. And if not, well, I have absolutely no idea how to get through, and getting back to the particular location is a slog; you have to keep randomly going directions in Witt’s End many times, enough times that the game prompts multiple times if you want a hint at getting out!
Incidentally, trying to leave after arriving at the door is death:
N
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!
It might be that the only way the enter is via the other side, and the only reason I know that is yet another bug:
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
You’re in hall of mists.
Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
GET AXE
key hole on the other side. There is, however, a key hole on this side.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
The “key hole on the other side” line seems to be randomly printing from somewhere else in the text. I’m extremely patient with jank and frustration in games, but when it might be combined with a bug it becomes too much. It potentially turns getting unstuck not just “figure out what the author intended” but also “make sure to avoid memory corruption”.
And as mentioned before, there’s the extra condition of “avoid getting killed by a knife”. Original Adventure always had a dwarf appear first and throw an axe that missed; you can get unlucky and meet an orc first, meaning you will have no weapon at all. Or you can get super unlucky and die immediately upon sight of an orc, although it doesn’t matter; either way you are essentially dead.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It gets you!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?
One other bit of business, though: I accidentally missed an exit.
This is back where you find the ring; you can turn west to enter a Crypt, with a “vault” to the west. I wasn’t able to get any farther, though.
You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
GET RING
OK
N
You are in small room with dirt floor.
The gate is up.
W
You are in a crypt. A coffin is standing in the middle of the room.
There seems to be a vault to the west. A passage leads east.
The vault door is closed.
The coffin is closed.
OPEN COFFIN
You don’t have the necessary piece of metal for doing that.
This area turns out to be the section taken from a Greg Hassett article in Creative Computing, July 1980 on how to write an adventure. If you’re not familiar with Greg Hassett (who at this time was 14), you can try my writeup of World’s Edge; in the article he mentions his games before that are (in order), The House of Seven Gables, King Tut’s Tomb, Sorcerer’s Castle, Voyage to Atlantis, Enchanted Island, and a machine-language version of the same game called Enchanted Island Plus.
This is not from any of Hassett’s games, but rather an imaginary game written purely for the article. The Studio-54 group turned it into a real game! Except there is some variation because holding the ring does not allow for opening the coffin (as suggested in the article) and while there’s a limited number of items to test I’ve spent a week struggling so I’m done.
I did at least get to test throwing the ring in the volcano (just in case of a Tolkien reference) but alas, nothing happens.
I’m afraid I’ve left things too incomplete to make any large conclusions, but I do want to emphasize the code is currently held together with duct tape and being run on an emulator. It is easily possible that some of the difficulties I mention are due to bugs or emulator issues and so aren’t “authentic”; this is especially possible with random number generators which are enormously finicky across platforms. (A concrete example: for a long time the Pokémon Red/Blue speedrun community banned all emulators except for a very specific one called gambatte-speedrun; every single one had different RNG than a real Gameboy, despite many being completely authentic otherwise and even allowed with other games. Now, there’s exactly two emulators allowed, and all others are banned.) Given the endgame isn’t even reachable with the current game’s state I don’t feel that bad about setting it aside.
COMING UP: A type-in, followed by the glorious return of Infocom.
Renga in Blue 
I can shed light on all of this, so just let me know if you want me to.
I will say that there are only two serious bugs in the game (both simple flagging errors) that affect the taking of two of the new treasures. Any other bugs or text issues are minor and don’t affect progress in the game. It’s actually not that buggy overall, just a bit janky and (intentionally, I believe) very difficult, especially with the lack of saves.
By the way, the room/puzzle sequence with the coffin, ring, etc. is not the only thing they took from the Hassett article. They actually used one or two example room descriptions from the text of the article as well, but it’s in a different part of the cave.
Rot-13 maybe for any readers who are curious? Hoping to come back to this one day.
Okay, I’ll hold off unless there’s a specific request, then. I’ll only say that the part which is bothering you the most (aside from random deaths and lack of saves, of course) is not bugged.
There are really only a handful of bugs, and a couple lines of misplaced text. It’s just that two of those bugs prove fatal to reaching the endgame. Almost all of the new content is reachable through regular play (there are just a few exceptions), and it’s even possible (but incredibly difficult) to put together a “perfect” run, by reaching but then bypassing those two trouble spots. There were a couple of things I never quite figured out fully, but they wouldn’t have prevented me from “winning”, and with maybe one or two exceptions it was because of parser issues and sheer difficulty in retracing everything over and over to test solutions, rather than bugs.
I had fun working through it overall, but I had the extra motivation of it being a “job” for me as part of the larger preservation and historical project. This game is evil and sadistic, and I don’t blame anyone for giving it a wide berth. It’s a shame in a way though, because some of the new content is really quite cool and inventive for an Adventure variant, but I think the Studio-54 boys were more interested in giving each other a hard time than in catering to the general public. Kind of like the Phoenix crew, but less British boffin and more Viking bloodlust…
I still have the original ICL Quest from the first assault. Despite many restores I only managed to pick the dog up once and I don’t have a saved position from that point. I did eventually elude the dinosaur by invoking the brute force approach of visiting every location until finding the one place it couldn’t negotiate. I await the shiny new version with interest.
I still have the original ICL Quest from the first assault. Despite many restores I only managed to pick the dog up once and I don’t have a saved position from that point. I did eventually elude the dinosaur by invoking the brute force approach of visiting every location until finding the one place it couldn’t negotiate. I await the shiny new version with interest.
Just a quick heads-up that HP1000 Adventure 425 is now available:
https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/
It’s a lot easier, I promise!
Oh, what a shame. It’d have been interesting to dive into FORTRAN code for a change.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that Hansen seems to have completely vanished, especially since, aside from the source code, he’s likely the only person to have the Norwegian language version.
Nord Fortran 77 is just a small variation of the standard, and I think even I could manage to fix the couple of silly flagging errors that were somehow introduced in this disk release of the game.
So, after beating LONG0751, I figured I’d give this a try and…I think I’ve already discovered something Jason hasn’t mentioned in this series?
The word “SINBAD” does *not* open a door or something. It relates to a certain additional magical ability that one of the classic treasures has. (For the record, this is not the first Adventure variant to give said ability to said treasure. And I only got the sequence because I happened to be carrying said treasure in a particular room.)
I will keep trying and will report back on anything else I find if you want.
Let me know if you need any hints. I still have all my notes and maps from the preservation project.
Well, one run I actually got most of the Woods stuff (except I never saw the pirate so couldn’t get the chest). I had 169 points. That was mostly to ensure that was the same; I’ve been killed on other runs since trying some of the new sections. (And incidentally, I got that same message I first wrote about in a second location…)
I’ve also found (what I think is) the other side of that stairway where Jason was getting killed by a snake, though I’ve just seen the death and haven’t gone further.
Oh, and those extra-lethal dwarrves? They apparently can also carry stuff in this version, just like Adventure 440. I’ll have to be careful not to leave stuff lying around the cave!
The dwarves don’t “tidy” here to the original locations like in 440. It’s more like a combination of stealing treasures you have or moving them around semi-randomly. There seem to be certain parameters to this (it’s mostly the “early” treasures and only in certain areas of the cave), and you always know it just happened when you see “HOO-HAW!!!”. Took me a while to figure that out…
Going back to your mention of that one treasure’s other use, I had speculated that the Studio-54 guys had probably played some of the other early Adventure extensions, and a few months ago I received confirmation from one of them that they did indeed have “multiple versions” of Adventure available at NTH back then. Woods 430 is definite, and 440 seems possible too. The code itself was never based on these (it was from Supnik’s last ’78 revision), but some ideas probably were, although they went in different directions with them.
Alright. This morning I have managed to solve my problems with the dungeon cell, the torture chamber, and the dance hall. I’ve found something in the dance hall that I think, based on the game not knowing a verb, is probably just a treasure.
I’m now stuck at a place where I think the rope and graphnel is used but I can’t seem to get it to work. Maybe I’m just phrasing it wrong.
So the riddle is basically me being on the other side of a “baseball maze” situation? Great lol
Alright, just an assemblage of notes of things I’ve found. I’ve basically seen everywhere Jason got. This is gonna be a bit disorganized; for now I’ll only take hints if something I’m describing isn’t working as expected, or maybe hints of the “right/wrong track” variety. (Also, it goes without saying that there are some minor spoilers in what follows.)
*I have been able to open the barrel tap at the Hall of the Mountain Kin and drink the liquid inside, or carry it in my bottle. If I drink it it says it must’ve been “fiery stuff”. I don’t know what effect this has. If it’s, like, supposed to help burn something down I’m not sure I’ve seen any candidates. And I’m not sure how to apply it since the game doesn’t know how to “empty” or “poor”.
*I’ve got the cell door open with the keys, but it locks and I can’t get out. There’s the skeleton of a knight with a sword inside, but no keyhole on the inside so the old “Zork 2” trick isn’t applicable (even if I knew how to do it with a two-word parser!). I don’t think I can take the skeleton, otherwise I’d think maybe that’s what the ghost who wants me to “bring back my body” wants…
*I’ve been able to read the parchment past the troll bridge. It says a “magic word” but the game doesn’t seem to understand that magic word. I’m not sure what’s going on. Also,I’m pretty sure I’ve had two different magic words on different runs.
*I have been able to get past the crack with the snake from the other direction. I think that’s resolved?
*Up past the shell room and the satchel there’s another section I don’t think Jason wrote about. I’m block in one direction by an iron gate, and in another by a quicksand bog. My first thought on the latter was “another Adventure variant has a similar problem in roughly the same part of the cave” but that solution didn’t work.
*I have managed to clean myself at the steel mirror. I’m not sure exactly what this accomplishes.
*I’ve gotten the elf princess’s attention and she asks me a riddle about Norse mythology. I don’t know the answer, obviously. Is this something easily Google-able today?
*I still have no clue what the deal with the crypt with the coffin and vault is. I might have to try bringing various objects in. It’s just…tedious to do the familiar parts over again.
*I’m not sure what the deal with the rug is. I’ve managed to get to a small isaldn that I can’t leave (and lose the rug in the process). I think I might have a command issue here but am not sure.
*I’ve foun a board with a “Tolkien was here” message, and it sounds like there’s another message behind it or something? I’m not sure what to do here.
*I liked Jason’s idea of trying to get a dwarf or orc to follow me into the dance hall but I couldn’t get it to work. Both times they just…wouldn’t follow me in. Scratch that idea?
*I have been able to open the barrel tap at the Hall of the Mountain Kin and drink the liquid inside, or carry it in my bottle. If I drink it it says it must’ve been “fiery stuff”. I don’t know what effect this has. If it’s, like, supposed to help burn something down I’m not sure I’ve seen any candidates. And I’m not sure how to apply it since the game doesn’t know how to “empty” or “poor”.
– Lbh jba’g arrq guvf hagvy yngre va gur tnzr.
*I’ve got the cell door open with the keys, but it locks and I can’t get out. There’s the skeleton of a knight with a sword inside, but no keyhole on the inside so the old “Zork 2” trick isn’t applicable (even if I knew how to do it with a two-word parser!). I don’t think I can take the skeleton, otherwise I’d think maybe that’s what the ghost who wants me to “bring back my body” wants…
– Guvf vf bar bs gur zbfg rivy guvatf va gur tnzr. N pbzznaq jvyy jbex urer gung gur tnzr qbrfa’g erpbtavmr naljurer ryfr. Ohg lbh pna cerirag guvf sebz unccravat va gur svefg cynpr. “Ybbx orsber lbh npg.”
*I’ve been able to read the parchment past the troll bridge. It says a “magic word” but the game doesn’t seem to understand that magic word. I’m not sure what’s going on. Also,I’m pretty sure I’ve had two different magic words on different runs.
– Gurer ner gjb qvssrerag cnvef bs zntvp jbeqf. Bar vf nyjnlf gur fnzr, naq vg frrzf lbh’ir nyernql cnegvnyyl qvfpbirerq vgf hfr. Gur bgure punatrf rnpu tnzr, naq unf n eryngrq hfr. Bayl gur barf gung ner fubja va gung cnegvphyne cynlguebhtu jvyy or erpbtavmrq va gur evtug fcbgf, juvpu orpbzrf irel barebhf qhr gb gur ynpx bs tnzr fnirf, nf lbh’yy unir gb tb naq svaq gurz ntnva rirel gvzr.
*I have been able to get past the crack with the snake from the other direction. I think that’s resolved?
– Guvf jubyr frpgvba vf bcgvbany. Gur guvatf lbh pna “frr” nera’g arprffnel bapr lbh’ir znccrq bhg gur tnzr lbhefrys, nygubhtu vg pna uryc gb ybpngr guvatf gung gur qjneirf unir zbirq nebhaq.
*Up past the shell room and the satchel there’s another section I don’t think Jason wrote about. I’m block in one direction by an iron gate, and in another by a quicksand bog. My first thought on the latter was “another Adventure variant has a similar problem in roughly the same part of the cave” but that solution didn’t work.
– V oryvrir guvf frpgvba vf vapbzcyrgr. Gurer’f grkg va gur pbqr vaqvpngvat fghss orlvaq vg, ohg vg’f abg npprffvoyr nf sne nf V xabj.
*I have managed to clean myself at the steel mirror. I’m not sure exactly what this accomplishes.
– Gur Rys cevaprff jba’g erprvir lbh hayrff lbh’er pyrna. Gurer’f n freinag jub cnffrf ol gb uvag ng guvf, ohg cneg bs gur grkg vf phg bss qhr gb n oht.
*I’ve gotten the elf princess’s attention and she asks me a riddle about Norse mythology. I don’t know the answer, obviously. Is this something easily Google-able today?
– Lrf, gur nafjre vf rnfl sbe nalbar jvgu n Fpnaqvanivna onpxtebhaq. Ubjrire, gur vf rkgerzryl svqqyl jvgu gur rknpg jbeqvat vg jvyy npprcg.
*I still have no clue what the deal with the crypt with the coffin and vault is. I might have to try bringing various objects in. It’s just…tedious to do the familiar parts over again.
– Guvf chmmyr pna or fbyirq nyy jvguva gung nern ol hfvat na vgrz gur evtug jnl. Tert Unffrgg jbhyq xabj… Ubjrire, vg’f nyy cbvagyrff orpnhfr guvf vf bar bs gjb cynprf jurer n fvzcyr synttvat reebe va gur pbqr zrnaf gur tnzr jba’g erpbtavmr fbzrguvat cebcreyl, guhf eraqrevat gur chmmyr hafbyinoyr naq znxvat gur gernfher lbh trg sbe vg habognvanoyr.
*I’m not sure what the deal with the rug is. I’ve managed to get to a small isaldn that I can’t leave (and lose the rug in the process). I think I might have a command issue here but am not sure.
– Guvf frdhrapr vf irel gevpxl, naq jvyy erdhver rkcrevzragngvba jvgu obgu frgf bs zntvp jbeqf va gur evtug cynprf. Trggvat onpx bapr lbh’ir tbggra npebff vf rira jbefr, naq gurer ner frevbhf ohtf ba gur bgure fvqr. Guvatf pna pbaarpg hc va qvssrerag jnlf bapr lbh’ir svtherq bhg ubj gb znc vg nyy bhg, gubhtu.
*I’ve foun a board with a “Tolkien was here” message, and it sounds like there’s another message behind it or something? I’m not sure what to do here.
– Guvax bs qvssrerag vgrzf lbh zvtug unir naq ubj lbh zvtug hfr bar gb trg ng gung zrffntr.
*I liked Jason’s idea of trying to get a dwarf or orc to follow me into the dance hall but I couldn’t get it to work. Both times they just…wouldn’t follow me in. Scratch that idea?
– Lrnu, fpengpu gung bar. Gur fbyhgvba vf eryngrq gb fbzrguvat ryfr lbh’er fghpx ba.