Archive for May 2026
The story so far:
PRISM was a storydisk/game released by a business software company, International Software Marketing, in 1982. Inside are clues that lead to real life buried treasure: three golden keys. Back in January of this year, I wrote a series about the game and the commenters of this blog took a swing at solving the puzzles.
My original posts used the Apple II version (which still seems to be the original intended platform), but an Atari version surfaced as well (thanks to Atarimania). By comparing the two versions it became clear there was nothing special hidden in the layout of the text-only pages.
I wasn’t expecting to do any updates this week, but: back in February, velvetfistironglove had pointed out a mention of an IBM PC port in PC Mag, and linked to a CP/M version which might be related. (I had filed this away but I was burnt out on PRISM enough I figured I’d return to it later.) A few days ago, LocalH picked up the baton, and found that the CP/M file was for the Toshiba Pasopia computer, or more specifically, their T100 computer which launched in the United States. The only catch is the file did not want to run.
After some more work (from Rob, gschmidl, and the crew of folks who worked on rescuing Mystery House II including bsittler and eientei) it became clear the issue was the embedded copy protection, and after ripping that out, the storydisk/game became playable. (Download here.)
At least one of the puzzles is made harder, but a certain important aspect may have been made easier. (I have to hedge since we don’t actually know any answers for certain!) I will go through the new content just like I did with Atari, but I first want to explore how the program ended up on the ultra-obscure Toshiba T100 to begin with.
The early 80s were a graveyard for Japanese companies trying to import their computers into the United States, computers like the Fujitsu Micro 16s, the NEC TREK, the Panasonic JR-200, and the Sanyon MBC-550, which was allegedly IBM PC compatible but failed to run a great deal of IBM software. Epson did well selling printers but failed outside of Japan with their portable HX-20.
Toshiba had a long history with computers by this point, with work dating back to the 1950s with the TAC developed at the University of Tokyo and the TOSBAC series of mainframes developed in the 1960s.
However, a long history does not indicate commercial success for personal computers; while they did well with the Pasopia and Pasopia-7 computers in Japan, they never broke the top sales echelon over the heavy hitters (NEC PC-88, Fujitsu FM-7, Sharp X1, MSX). Like all the other companies, they wanted to give their shot in the United States; to do this, they hired Sorel Reisman, who had recently moved to the United States. Reisman was hired from IBM Canada to work with Discovision in California; it quickly became clear it wasn’t going to work commercially so he started shopping for another job, finding one when he met the Vice President of Toshiba.
Toshiba had just gone into the computer business here, and they had just started a division called the Computer Systems Division. The guy who was heading that up, I met him. They had essentially two groups; they had the printer group and they had the computer group. This was in 1981 Toshiba was trying to get into the computer business here, they wanted to compete with the IBM PC, which had just been launched — this was in 1981 — they wanted to bring their wonderfully better-manufactured personal computers over here (to the US) and compete against the IBM PC.
The T100, a Pasopia with some tweaks for the American market. From an old eBay auction. There’s a blank key on the top row (next to “LABEL”) because that was the kanji key in the Japanese version.
He was hired to head the computer division starting in 1982, but ran into an issue nearly all the Japanese companies were slamming into: software. The system used CP/M which is technically cross-compatible with certain software, but this still wasn’t the same thing as IBM compatible. As Reisman points out, clients were wanting to run Lotus 1-2-3 (the big spreadsheet software after VisiCalc) but couldn’t, so they weren’t interested.
Instead of Lotus, the computer came with Magic Worksheet, software barely anyone cared about. From a 1983 Multitech catalog.
In July of 1983 they tried “re-introducing” the computer to the market as “portable” by adding a LCD display, although coverage had a tone of skepticism (“the T100 runs solely on 110 AC cord power, rather than on AA batteries, thus limiting its usefulness in long distance travel.”)
InfoWorld Jul 18, 1983.
To take a stab at the software gap Toshiba introduced products scrounged from supportive developers, which is why they ended up hooking up with International Marketing Systems, and getting their Mathemagic, Graph Magic, and Prism software as part of the $1600 package. (Rob pointed out the connection a long while back.) Toshiba discontinued the T100 only a year later, in 1984, so this all represents a fast-moving blip in computing history. (They took another stab with the portable T1000 in 1987; learning their lesson from last time, they made it actually IBM compatible.)
While (as I already indicated) we don’t have the DOS version of PRISM, the T100 version is likely close, although modifications to the graphics would still be needed. The source code turns out to be pure BASIC. (Link here. A few characters are off.) The copy protection involves checking for an (intentional) error on the disk, and if that error is present, allowing the program to go forward; once this check was removed the game could run. The fact the porting isn’t 1-1 and that the CP/M port came after the other three versions is important: it means that this is essentially a “version 2” of the software. As LocalH points out, two typos are fixed.
I notice that “Hubert’s” and “ecstasy” are correct in this version (surrounding the “TRET” screen, on pages 20 and 22) but “gazing redly” is still written exactly that way on page 20.
(I never thought “gazing redly” was a typo, given the story’s theming.)
An easier-to-read font compared to Apple and Atari.
You can see a very curious difference from the first graphic, and the part that I alluded to earlier that makes for a harder puzzle. Apple and Atari first:
Now, the T100 version of the same:
Everything is much more chunky. Positions have been slightly altered (and assuming they didn’t mess anything up, it means some positional elements to the images have to be unimportant). The I Ching reference is much muddier now:
Without the rows-of-lines element, I would not have the symbol identified as from the I Ching at all! Additionally, in the “broken tree” picture, as you’ll see later, the symbol is moved from a spot next to the tree to the corner. This suggests two things: a.) that the symbols really are important, important enough they spent the time to render it here despite the difficulty and b.) the exact position of a symbol is not important, but rather that it marks a particular page.
Enough preface; here’s the rest of the images. If you want to download them as a pack (including the text) I have them all zipped together here.
Besides the positional shifting, the other big change of note is the colors. The highlighted letters are now only either red or blue! I’m not sure if that really means the exact coloring is unimportant; it may be the developer simply lost control given hardware restraints (just like the Atari had some odd colors based on what row of the screen it was drawing). At the very least, any solution needs to be at least somewhat compatible with this variation (keeping in mind, like the I Ching puzzle, it’s possible some clue or clues were lost).
So far, out of the Falsoft contest adventures, I’ve played Polynesian Adventure, Search for the Ruby Chalice, and Escape from Sparta. I pointed out last time that these tend to be the only games published by the particular authors, although in the case of today’s author (Robert Mangum II) this isn’t true. He published two games, one that won in the first Falsoft contest and one that won in the second.
Robert Mangum, a 15-year-old sophomore at Astronaut High School in Titusville, Fla., purchased his TRS-80 Color Computer when he was an eighth grader. His hobbies include reading, playing the stock market, and writing Color Computer games. He aspires to pursue the latter hobby as a career.
As the “Astronaut” in the school name implies, Titusville is east of Orlando, close to Cape Canaveral and one of the US’s space launch sites.
I’m unclear if the introductions to the various games given in the book are written by the author(s) themselves or by the magazine editors, although I suspect the latter for reasons I’ll get into. Horror House’s book-intro has a very Encyclopedia Brown feel to the writing, and even though the lore doesn’t affect the game at all I felt like reading this one out loud. No overdramatic Dungeon Master this time, I went with something a little more like Goosebumps.
In summary, in order to get into a local club, we have to prove we aren’t a “chicken” by going into the local Horror House and defeating the various “ghouls and goblins”. (!!) Not even pretending there aren’t any and you’ll be safe, nope, you actually gotta commit homicide, kid. Hope being popular is worth it!
The game starts with an animated visual effect where the initials of the author draw themselves into the distance, then disappear.
I love it when cinematic ambition gets applied to the start of a regular type-in text game.
This is a game fairly similar to the last one we played (Escape from Sparta) in which there’s an overall “health” stat; Sparta called it Energy, but this game just calls it Health Points, similar to but not exactly like Dungeons & Dragons (which used “hit points”).
The game is up-front this is going to be combat focused, but with rules that are somewhat unusual for an adventure game: you regenerate health, and the monsters reincarnate. Specifically, you get 1 HP back every 10 turns, and one monster reincarnates every 50 turns. (If you see a loophole in this already, I’ll get back to you later.) You can “REST” only once but it will cause a total reset of your HP, at the cost of resurrecting all dead enemies.
The game also gives the complete (restricted) verb list.
MOVE, PULL, OR PUSH
PUT, LEAVE, OR DROP
PUNCH / HIT
N, S, E, OR W
INVENTORY
INSERT
LOOK
REST
GET OR TAKE
The game announces AS YOU ENTER THE HOUSE THE DOOR LOCKS but gives no room description. There essentially isn’t one. After LOOK:
You are informed of any objects or enemies in a particular room, and if the room doesn’t have any, it just is described as having NOTHING.
You can MOVE STATUE which reveals a blue coin, but it also turns the statue into a living statue (one of the enemies).
A more typical room, just north of the start.
I started with a traditional adventure map but quickly realized I would be better off breaking out Dungeon Scrawl and doing a Wizardry-style map instead.
The enemies (where PUNCH and HIT must be applied) move around so I don’t know on a particular game if they’ll always be where I placed them, but at the very least this is a deterministic setup; there is no random rearrangement at turn one. My first battle was a giant crab at a vending machine where I punched it in the face (?).
No real time element here: just slowly exchanging blows while health points go down on both sides. Not all enemies have the same starting health (there’s a rat early that starts lower, for instance).
You are allowed to run away; enemies may chase you, and you can easily find a situation with multiple creatures clustering in the same room.
In the crab and snake vs. protagonist battle above, this is actually crab version 2, after resurrecting. Remember that enemies resurrect after 50 turns. Given that a fight can take up to ten, and walking from one side of the map to the other can take as much as fifteen (assuming you know where you’re going to hunt down an enemy) trying to get all the enemies to stay dead at the same time is a bit of a dilemma.
There are two puzzles (besides the blue coin); one is a bed that simply be moved to reveal an exit.
The other is a computer (“IT IS A 64K COLOR COMPUTER”); there’s a tape cassette elsewhere (guarded at least at the start by a rat) and INSERT TAPE will open a second secret door.
A sword is out in the open (past the first secret door) and it does seem to help a little so I found the best strategy was to make a beeline there first. (PUNCH explicitly is “attack with no weapon” while HIT explicitly means “attack with the sword”, and you can’t hit things without the sword. This gets at the “game-meaning of verbs doesn’t match dictionary-meaning” problem I had with The Phantom Ship.)
I tried just naively hitting everything but the tendency of monsters to cluster meant I was succumbing to too much damage, and REST seemed to reset everything so that didn’t help, until I realized the loophole I alluded to earlier: while you can personally restore health, and enemies can resurrect, the enemies cannot restore health.
This means the best strategy is to hit each enemy down to low health, but not kill them. It’s a little like catching Pokemon.
Once I had enough enemies whittled down to single digits, I picked a starting place just outside an enemy (the MINOTAUR which I knew I had at 1), did REST, and started a slaying spree. The goal is to kill faster than they resurrect, and my strategy worked such that I only had to deal with one resurrection, the minotaur I started with.
Enemies can run away as well. The movement of enemies keeps the combat from being ultra-dull like adventure-game-combat often is, but just regular dull. You need more options (like Eamon) for it to feel like more than just a sequence of dice rolls.
Once you’ve killed all the monsters, if you go back to the computer you’ll find it has fallen into a pile of rubble. LOOK PILE reveals a red coin; you can combine that with the blue coin from under the statue and a gold coin just lying out in the open and take them back to the vending machine.
The key then can be inserted at the door at the start, letting you escape.
I should highlight that the opening text from the book (which I recorded) had falsehoods. Not only are there no ghouls (and just one goblin), but the text claims the house will explode when the computer does. I was genuinely worried by that last part but there’s no timer: the computer simply falls apart, and you are in complete safety once all the monsters are dead. Also notice that the screenshot-intro said nothing about us doing a dare and wanting to join a club. I think the opening was so abrupt that the book editors (Lawrence Falk, James Reed, Susan Remini) decided they needed to add some context; not only did the context not make sense, but it was actively deceptive and changed my behavior at the end of the game (until I realized no explosion was forthcoming).
I haven’t found any letters complaining about embellishment, so the authors must have just let it go.
Before signing out, I should add that JIMMY ADVENTURE 5 strikes again: the was a misprint in the original book that made the source code for this game entirely broken.
Coming up: I’m finishing something else (it’s related to the blog, but not another game) so the next post will be delayed by about a week.
This returns to the Tandy CoCo adventure contest from Rainbow magazine, culminating in thirteen games printed in The Rainbow Book of Adventures; I’ve played Polynesian Adventure and Search for the Ruby Chalice so far. I wanted to get a few more of the set taken care of. Even though I’m not following strict chronology by month, the book was released in January and I’d feel awkward being near the end of my 1983 sequence and still pulling games to play from the book.
Just as a reminder, this contest was run before both Scott Adams and Infocom were available on Tandy CoCo; there wasn’t many adventures to pick from at all. The authors of the contest tended to be enthusiasts rather than gaming professionals and most of the entries seem to be the only published game from each particular author or authors.
Today’s selection involves a pair of authors, just like Polynesian Adventure, although Rainbow magazine made a mistake and just credited Rick Townsend, leading to a correction letter.
I was very pleased to learn when I arrived home from vacation that my program Escape From Sparta was selected as a winner in your First Annual Adventure Contest. The following day I bought a copy of January’s issue and was excited to see that it had won Best Science Fiction Trophy. I was, however, extremely disappointed to see that the name of Thomas Hollerback, co-writer of this adventure did not appear with my own. Without his help I could not have written Escape From Sparta. Escape From Sparta was a joint effort and intended to be a joint entry. Apparently, I may have misled you when I enclosed a separate letter in reference to the game signed only by myself. Tom’s name appears along with my own in the program heading. Please give Tom the credit which he also deserves.
Rick Townsend
Bettendorf, IA
The book has things printed properly and biographical notes for both authors.
Rick Townsend is a self-taught computer enthusiast who works as a computer operator for United Totalisator International. Thomas Hollerback, co-author, is a 1983 graduate of Central Michigan University and a perspective CPA. Both men enjoy video and Adventure games.
Thomas Hollerback did indeed become a CPA and became quite successful in the profession, serving as chairman for various boards of directors and becoming named president & CEO of Yeo & Yeo in 2013.
Rick Townsend I’ve been getting too many nameclashes to be sure on, but United Totalisator is a curious company indeed to be located at the far east of Iowa (on the Mississippi River) in 1982/1983. Totalisator equipment is intended for handling betting (horse racing, dog racing, etc.) and while Bettendorf did become a center of gambling, it only happened after 1989 when Iowa legalized riverboat gambling. (Iowa was the first state to do so; I’ve written more about that here.) However, it was still possible to bet directly at horse tracks at this time, so it isn’t absurd as placement for a gambling company; Arlington track in particular was not far away in Illinois and had just recently had the first million dollar horse race.
The important point here is that programmers were spread out all across the country, not just hovering around Silicon Valley/California and MIT, and in a contest meant to encourage amateurs it’d drag some of the less-commonly-associated-with-game-development places out of the woodwork.
As the book’s plot intro indicates, we are part of a “superior race of robots” and our creator is a “highly regarded” person who is an “epitome of virtue.” (I guess the polar opposite of Davros from Dr. Who.)
You are a Combutron X robot, one of the most advanced and most loyal of his races, and your assignment is to defend the good side of the universe. Recently, the warlord, master of the evil alliance, has developed a secret plan to control all the planets. To succeed, he must capture and kill your creator. Then, the robot race will not be properly maintained, and the robots will expire — eliminating any resistance to the warlord’s evil clutches.
Our goal is to rescue Light Davros our creator.
The game starts with an “instructions file” with a title screen (see above) and a bit more information about what’s going on.
YOUR MISSION: FIND THE CREATOR ABOARD THE SPACE STATION SPARTA AND ESCAPE.
PLEASE STANDBY TO BE BEAMED ABOARD SPARTA. GOOD LUCK!
ENTER ‘POKE 25,6:POKE 26,1:NEW’ BEFORE LOADING WITH CLOAD
The instructions given here with the POKEs and the NEW command clear out the BASIC memory for maximum space. (This includes the program that just ran, which is why the player needs to type it in after the starting program is done.)
The game then puts you right in the action, and there’s a semi real-time component. If you are being attacked by a HUMAN or ROBOT (as you are at the landing spot here) you’ll get a rotation of the human/robot attacking over and over if you don’t press any keys. You need to press ENTER, which will then let you type a response (SHOOT ROBOT). The game does not require the actual typing to be done in real time (unlike Keys of the Wizard, which was willing to interrupt your typing mid-line).
It’s also possible to miss many times in a row. I discovered later after the first SHOOT ROBOT/HUMAN it was possible to just type SHOOT, but you have to be more specific the first time around.
Once combat is done, you can search the corpse/rubble, and find either a GREENCHIP (from a human) or a REDCHIP (from a robot).
Other than that, the only thing to pay attention to is consoles. For example, if you go up from the starting room, you arrive at a console.
For the security clearance, you need to insert a chip. Redchips are the lowest level clearance, followed by greenchips, followed by a single silverchip (held by the captain). As far as I could tell there is nothing special about silverchips vs. greenchips, but for escape pods (which you need to use at the end) you have to have a greenchip rather than a redchip.
After inserting the chosen chip, you can start the console with $ and then enter commands to it. In the room above, the door to the east is locked, so if you UNLOCK DOOR it will take care of the problem.
Here’s the rest of the upper-section map, although I believe there is some randomization in robot/human placement (there definitely is in finding the Creator):
There are some environmental aspects, and when I first started playing I was dutifully mapping them, and even trying to interact with them, but for the most part only the enemies and the consoles are important (with one exception).
Hence, this ends up being a little more like a strategy game (akin to the Apex Trading Haunted House with the odd bonus attribute that I didn’t know I was until I had finished the game. You certainly can’t visit everywhere, because your robot has a certain amount of energy and will eventually run out; not just from fights…
…but from the fact that walking around also drains energy.
Hence, it’s better to skip certain fights if you know you don’t need the chips you get out of them. You need at least one red or green chip for opening doors, and at least one green or silver chip for taking an escape pod away.
For my game, the best approach was to a.) shoot the robot at the start b.) use the red chip to go down to the “bottom access chamber” and unlock the door c.) head west and fight the human in the kitchen, taking the greenchip and d.) going north to the lab and fighting the robot.
You don’t need the robot’s chip.
You can then take the creator…
…and blast out the exit, using a greenchip to activate the pod.
The last command here is being typed in the “console” rather than being given to the robot.
There’s one more entirely optional thing you can do, and it’s interesting that the game doesn’t mention it as a “bad ending” if you skip doing the thing: you can blow up the space ship. At the nuclear reactor (see NE corner of the bottom part of the map) there is a lever you can pull.
The four minutes here pass in real time. If you haven’t won by then, you blow up with the spaceship. Winning with the explosion coming doesn’t give a different winning message.
I ran past some robots rather than fight them, meaning my energy was lower than my other win.
While the random attacking is the same mundane thing seen in many of our games, the fact you can utterly bypass the enemies — yet also get a useful (and predictable) resource from killing them — makes this have a slight bit of interest as a strategy game. The game is too short and simple in the end to hold up historically, but it does suggest an maneuver that could be done in an adventure-roguelike format.
Thanks to gschmidl for technical assistance (the POKE/CLOAD setup seemingly doesn’t work when you load the game from menus in xRoar, I was only able to run the game using the command line).
Renga in Blue 
