Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Something I never saw anyone mention is that YOLVSA is an anagram of Solvay, the name of a village in…

For those in the comments here who don’t know… “CRPG Addict” will be playing this exactly one week from today…

“[15 year old Robert Magnum’s] hobbies include reading, playing the stock market, and writing Color Computer games. He aspires to…

Of course not, that’s absurd. Dark Souls is a Houselike.

uh is this a souls like? rest and the enemies come back? ha

Did he talk at all about his motivation in making it, and making it a caveman?

I lived near Dave in Garforth and was probably the first person to test the final version of the game.…

Never know when you might need to program a 1950s computer!

Subroutine calls had to be preceded by appropriate placement of the return address. Each instruction included the address of the…

I have OCR’ed Survival, and then manually edited each line. I’ve put it in PasteBin. I have double-checked both the…

…that “Storydisk” font could have done with a clearer lowercase s, even if they had to make it four pixels…

wow crazy so many games/game books with contest that no one ever solved

That’d actually be nice to have, but I don’t recall anyone getting transcripts of the third Ahl book https://archive.org/details/Big_Computer_Games/page/n85/mode/2up Probably…

Other than the Atari weirdness in colored letters due to changing the palette partway through the frame, it does seem…

Sorry if this is a dup…Does anyone know of a text version of the original code? It was written in…

Totally irrelevant coincidence, but the joke I made about the Prism monster art resembling several well-known characters of the era…

the content here wasn’t relevant enough for me to include in the main text, but this post about the never-released…

[…] Graph Magic, and Prism software as part of the $1600 package. (Rob pointed out the connection a long while…

[…] back in February, velvetfistironglove had pointed out a mention of an IBM PC port in PC Mag, and linked…

I notice that “Hubert’s” and “ecstasy” are correct in this version (surrounding the “TRET” screen, on pages 20 and 22)…

Very few normal BASIC commands seem to be understood. Even something like PRINT or LIST gives a syntax error. this…

for those who don’t want to mess with an emulator, here are all the screenshots taken on Pasopia, including one…

arrow keys (left and right) note that one of the pages (the one that shows a fallen tree) skips by…

I can’t figure out how to get past the title screen. Is this by chance joystick-based? Or am I just…

the masterminds behind the Mystery House II rescue (eientei, bsittler, gschmidl) got it working. turns out to be (after the…

Here are the T100 manuals (including the BASIC). Maybe these will help? https://archive.org/details/toshiba-t-100-manuals/Toshiba%20T100%20Owners%20Manual/

Haha… Yeah, the whole ISM/ Toshiba thing completely slipped my mind. I dug all that company history up last year…

I can’t understand what’s going on with the “T-DISK BASIC Ver 1.0” when booting straight from the PRISM disk. Very…

Interesting. CP/M is bootable, but doesn’t see anything on the PRISM disk. Since the uploader of PRISM claims it’s CP/M,…

Ah I think I figured out how to reply below you. Most of the 3rd-level comments and below on this…

Replying here because none of the child comments seem to have a reply link for me. I’m just going to…

Can you share where you found this package? The CP/M disk I found won’t convert with the tool you mentioned,…

I tried booting with a CP/M disk and it listed no files on the PRISM disk. “FILES 1” and “BLOAD”…

I’ve been using the pasopia.exe emulator found alongside pasopia7 in the package I found. I’ve seen it mentioned on other…

That’s an interesting find. They never advertised a CP/M version (as far as I can tell), but their earlier MatheMagic…

I’m not sure what you’re using here (I can’t get the disk to boot with Takeda’s pasopia7), but try FILES…

I almost thought I had it running. I booted from the PRISM disk and typed ‘RUN”PRISM”‘. It seemed to access…

I also had to use the tool found here: http://s-sasaji.ddo.jp/bml3mk5/download.htm#l3diskex to convert from .img to .d88 for the emulator to…

The closest I’ve been able to get is to boot a Pasopia emulator (using T100 ROMs I found) with a…

I looked inside that “CP/M” disk image and found the string “Toshiba T-DISK BASIC Ver 1.0”. Perhaps this was intended…

thanks!

So far, out of the Falsoft contest adventures, I’ve played Polynesian Adventure, Search for the Ruby Chalice, and Escape from Sparta. The first…

Thomas Hollerback did indeed become a CPA and became quite successful in the profession, serving as chairman for various boards of…

[…] is a game fairly similar to the last one we played (Escape from Sparta) in which there’s an overall…

[…] this ends up being a little more like a strategy game (akin to the Apex Trading Haunted House with…

Thanks very much – have a good rest of your week!

Speaking of wordpress issues, the link to Williamsburg Adventure doesn’t work. I haven’t noticed that happening in a while.

I’m basically sticking with the pre-sets for my template and I don’t have too much issue, other than some weird…

Really enjoyed this—there’s something fascinating about seeing how early adventure games handled both design and limitations at the same time.…

Because boarders wind up hiding from the gruel, obviously.

I found this interesting, so I looked it up, and it appears that St. Andrew’s was both a local day…

Huh? A boarder is a student who is boarded at the school, presumably opposed to the player character who lives…

Is the “boarder” thing maybe a posh joke? Like they are so posh they run away from bad food?

[…] became very interested in the technical underpinnings of the computer (learning assembly from Nick Hampshire’s book VIC Unleashed); he…

Thanks Jason. I’ve added that fix to my English version. And I have changed the verb “SCAN”, which was meant…

thanks for the check in! I will definitely take another swing at this sometime now that I know progress is…

Sorry for the “test” spam, I left another comment earlier and it failed to post. Anyway…I was wrong about having…

Test

Key under the pile is described as a safe key with LOOK.

Thanks Jason for the complete walkthrough and all the detailed translation and archival work. And thanks gschmidl for the source…

Thanks to the Gerries for the English version of this!

I agree that the kanji basically looked like crap when first implemented in the 8 and 16 bit eras, and…

indeed, more of a “me” thing as I said although to be fair, _someone_ was shelling out ¥35,000 for the…

‘The only catch is that you need to be careful that you aren’t typing the wrong letter in the katakana…

Jason, Thank you so much for the kind words. You were extremely generous given how bad the game was (but…

lesse, there’s Rob Davis https://bluerenga.blog/2026/01/20/the-colonels-house-interview-with-the-author/ Roy Niederhoffer https://bluerenga.blog/about/#comment-103910 the son of Richard Ramella https://bluerenga.blog/2022/12/21/fun-house-ramella-1982/ Alex Kreis https://bluerenga.blog/2020/12/08/the-domes-of-kilgari-1981/#comment-105182 Randy Dobkin https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/05/raspion-adventure-1981/#comment-101728…

“I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime”HA how often…

This I think makes you officially the youngest person featured solo on this site! Only younger is a classroom that…

I was 8-10, trying to teach myself BASIC. I was a HUGE fan of Scott Adams and thought writing my…

Thanks for coming by! I would not call them garbage (I especially liked this one!) Could you talk about the…

My name is Rich Herrick. There are my games. I know they are garbage, but I wrote them as a…

this is more progress than I’ve heard anyone else get!

I’ve started playing this on Cyber1. You gave me the idea that the Curtain of Light was passible, which really…

“GW-BASIC certainly supports it as well (but it is obviously a later product).”No, that’s not obvious, and is actually incorrect.…

Oh, well, there’s always the chance that something eventually does come out. (I mean, I technically do have a Windows…

Looking at the walkthrough, the game prompts for “right? left?” (migi? hidari?) a couple of times, so no special terms…

And maybe you should lay of the rum while playing mate. It’s affecting your eyesight;)

Low res back in the day. So frustrating that detail of the Japanese scripts could be so easily lost among…

[I wasn’t allowed to reply to the benevolentchum’s comment direclty.] Interesting. By reading benevolentchum’s comment, I have just now discovered…

yeah low-resolution fonts don’t help with the classic Similarly-Shaped Kana Mixup (as someone whose reading practice is often augmented by…

“Hello JERRY…” “Hello NUUMEN…”

and now that I have zoomed in, the first character is ever so slightly different, agh

there’s clearly something going on! these are both in the same room and are the same commands but one works…

Looking at the code, I can’t see anything that indicates that the Rum hint must be got. But line 4040…

There might be a bug in the code in the prayer routine: Check following line: 4040 IF LEFT$(A$,4)=LEFT$(V$(5),4)=0 THEN 4090…

I finally managed to get through, and it’s _terrible_ I was doing the right action (you can just type the…

yes, that’s correct as far as the unlocked doors go also, I had already listened to the skulls below, did…

And I don’t know if this effects the original game (probably not due to the Noun-Verb order of Japanese), but…

Oh, and if you get the right prayer phrase, you should get a message saying “Rest in Peace” or something…

You always have to go and visit the Pile and “Listen” for the message before praying over the other skeletons…

It seems that you need to not only “look” at rooms before you can interact with objects, but also AT…

if you’re meaning you can pray amen at random skeletons, I get either “nothing happens” or “I don’t know what…

I’ve completed my translation to English and port of the game to TRS-80 MC-10. I’ve also completed the game, so…

That makes sense. Read the first two pages of Supernova, which explains the whole situation with Interplanetary Communicator and all…

Aha, https://books.google.com/books?id=OgviEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA334 (Playing at the World 2E volume 1, page 334 note 15): “[Lucien’s] long association with the IFW [International…

Don’t eat those biscuits. If you look at them (before picking them up), you’ll get a message telling you they’re…

aaaaa ok, at the storage place where the cook’s room is, you can LOOK there to find a barrel. if…

ok, I’m trying to avoid going _too_ crazy poking at source code but there’s a bookcase somewhere and that’s the…

hmm, I may be just shifting the character set wrong (I’ve been using notepad++ for this in the past). looking…

That’s strange, I got it directly from the disk image! I’ll try again.