For those anticipating the second Impact Softwear game, my apologies. It turned out The Quest was quite solidly RPG rather than adventure. I added a note to my last post with some screenshots.
But that leaves us room for an entirely different oddball game! Allow me to first discuss the French computer industry.
The early 80s were chaos; no particular manufacturer was dominant, and the French had their own standards that gave difficulty to importers. Instead of video signals in NTSC (US, Japan) and PAL (most of Europe), France had SECAM. An adapter was required, and it caused (for example) the VIC-20 to only work in black and white. Also, all keyboards in France (as had been standard for a long time) used AZERTY standard instead of QWERTY.
Amidst this chaos, the publication Hebdogiciel was founded by Gérard Ceccaldi in late 1983. It was a weekly that printed software listings for the entire menagerie of French computers. In the 6 January 1984 issue it printed the top 15 computers by number of listings sent in. Leading the pack were Texas Instruments with the TI-99/4A, Oric with the Oric-1, and Sinclair with the ZX81. (If you’re wondering why not the ZX Spectrum, the ZX81 came in France early, but the ZX Spectrum came out late. By the time it arrived the Oric had eaten up a chunk of the same market.)
A 1986 issue via eBay.
Noteworthy for today is that 4 of the systems in the top 15 — added together, 15% of listings sent in — were pocket computers. Specifically: the Hewlett-Packard HP-41, Casio FX-702P, Sharp PC-1500, and Sharp PC-1211. These are essentially beefed-up programmable calculators. Sharp had one out in 1977 that used assembly language, and by 1980 companies were coming out with programmable calculators that used BASIC.
The Sharp 1211, first out in 1980, was also released by Tandy as the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. I’ve seen many US and UK source code publications now, some of them system-agnostic, and the level of pocket computer coverage was not nearly as high as it was in France.
Here’s a video cued up to where someone plays a Lunar Lander game on a TRS-80 Pocket Computer:
This is all meant to lead to the fact it wasn’t odd for Charles Feydy’s game Des Cavernes dans le poquette (“The Caverns in My Pocket”) to appear as a type-in an a French computer magazine. Specifically, the code was for TRS-80 Pocket Computer, and appeared in the Tandy-focused magazine Trace in their October 1982 issue.
What is unusual is that it manages to squeeze an entire adventure game (kind of) in 4K.
I wanted badly to run the original.
There is such a thing as pocket computer emulation (see: PockEmul) and I tested it out a bit, but I found I really needed the original model for compatibility (either the Tandy PC-1 or the Sharp 1211) and it isn’t supported. I did find an old beta copy of PockEmul that has the 1211 but it gets listed as “experimental” and it broke in my attempts to use it.
I was able to run the PC-2 (that’s the next Tandy machine, also just a Sharp PC-1500) but was running into cryptic issues involving slight changes in the BASIC syntax and the system itself. For example, in the PC-1 version you can write F=4F meaning “the variable F is 4 times F”; that is, 4F with no symbol between the 4 and F assumes a multiplication. This no longer works in the PC-2 version. You need to write 4*F instead. The character limit is tight enough that if you try to add a multiplication sign there, you’ll bust the limit of memory, so you need to remove characters elsewhere to compensate.
The biggest issue is that the original game uses arrays in a way where memory-bleed is nearly a feature. Essentially, before the game starts, you’re supposed to set A$(22) all the way up to A$(65) to a series of text lines, like A$(22)=”E PORTE”. This uses a different part of memory to squeeze even more out of the PC-1. However, on the PC-2 the array memory gets reset on starting a new program, so any reference to A$(22) will be an out-of-array bug rather than the text it is supposed to have.
This error means “Array specified without first DIMensioning it.”
Fortunately, there’s a way to play without the calculator, because Jim Gerrie has ported the game to TRS-80 MC-10. In the process he translated it to English.
The text of the magazine talks about exploring dark and dangerous caves. There are apparently 10 “keys” that can be applied to monsters and get points, but it is unclear the author even intended for it to be possible to get 10 keys. I have gotten, out of all the maps I have tested, 0 of them.
Unfortunately, the game is very broken in terms of generating a level that can be beaten, even moreso than Orb. Jim Gerrie is still worried there might be a bug in his code, but the original is so hard to run I haven’t been able to compare.
You start by picking a “number” which is a random seed, followed by a “difficulty level” (no idea what that does, I didn’t see any difference) and then you’re off to the races:
In this room, you can go all four directions; the PATH, TUNNEL, and LARGE are all just for color. If there’s a monster they will be blocking at least one exit.
In this randomly generated level, there are exits to the north and the south, and one TROLL blocking the north and south. Since there is nowhere to go, the only command that works here is RESTART.
Sometimes it felt like I could actually explore a bit, and get the vibe of an environment:
However, this invariably always got shut down a few turns later when I get stuck again.
Seriously, where are the keys? Would this game have been printed in a magazine if it was so impossible or is it just leveraging some obscure aspects of the PC-1 hardware that would make the experience quite different than it is now?
So this post is maybe just a placeholder for if some expert on pocket computers can come along and tell us what’s really going on. The thread here is where the game was first unearthed and it includes a text file of the source code.
(Shoutout to Strident and Jim Gerrie who helped me get the files for this all this way back in this thread.)
Renga in Blue 