Before reaching the finale, I’d like to mention two other historical tidbits on the author.
First, a number of people associated with CHROMAtrs — including the author himself — show up in this thread. A “Chuck Sites” who seems to be speaking from personal knowledge mentions
South Shore was lucky to get Robert French to write ChromaBasic. At Thirteen he could program circles around anybody. And he could type unbelievably fast too.
and a StevenHB, who actually worked for South Shore (the company that sold the hardware) adds
I worked with the author of CHROMA Basic, who was a (shockingly) young student from Kentucky.
with Robert French himself chiming in:
Wow, I just ran across this web page by accident. I’m the “shockingly young student from Kentucky” that StevenHB referred to above. I was 14 when I wrote and sold Chroma BASIC to South Shore, and I still remember it well. I also remember writing a Pacman-equivalent and some other games.
In the mid-80s Robert French’s other “big” TRS-80 product was a BBS system he called The French Connection.
I mention it not because the context will help with understanding Strange Adventure — it doesn’t really, other than being another showcase for our author’s machine language skills — but rather to dissuade any future historians from accidentally mixing up the program with a much more famous BBS. One of the very first personal BBSs (from 1979) was also called The French Connection, and was run out of California by an infamous con artist named Stephen Cohen. It was intended as a dating service. His shenanigans include posing as “Tammy”, who would not only keep the interest of lonely men but also extract their money (subscriptions were $18 a month).
My guess is Robert French was not aware of any of this when he named his BBS software.
Back to the game! Continuing from last time, I had vaporized a rock into rock dust (see above) and I was stuck on a “tiny hole” where the HELP command claimed some kind of hidden switch.
I pulled open the source code to solve the puzzle. First I checked the BASIC code to find the room itself:
17000 RO=33:PRINTB1$;” YOU ARE IN A SMALL ROOM. THERE IS A “;:IFAI=0THENPRINT”TINY”;ELSEPRINT”LARGE”;
17010 PRINT” HOLE AT YOUR FEET.”;:IFAI=0THENPRINT
17015 PRINT”THERE IS A PASSAGE TO THE EAST.”
It looks like the hole changes from TINY to LARGE when the variable AI is something other than 0, so I traced next where the value of AI gets changed.
156 AI=1:POKETR+NO,34:A=0:RETURN
Fine, where does line 156 get called? I traced it back to line 151, which seems to trigger when you drop an object, and specifically
IFRO=33ANDNO=7THEN156
That is, if the room number is 33 (the small room with the tiny hole) and the item we are dropping is 7, the flag changes.
Fine, which item is 7? From the machine code part I turned, with this section
SIC JEW ROP LAM BOT KEY RIN BOAT RUB LAS BAT PIL
The SICKLE is item 1, so counting from there, the RIN is 7. The ring?!? Why the ring?
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done it. I have found, after hundreds of games, the most absolutely pure piece of moon logic ever in an adventure game, and yes, this one deserves the name of “moon logic”.
The diamond ring drops into the room below.
The dragon does not block your way (nor stop you from taking the ring) so you can just be on your way if you want, and my first time through I did that, because this puzzle is rather difficult. Not “pure moon logic” this time, just rather tricky. Rather than plow in the order I solved things let’s just get this puzzle over now.
Examining the dragon has the game say THE DRAGON IS JUST THE KIND OF DRAGON YOU MEET EVERY DAY. The HELP indicates the dragon might be sleepy, and that refers back to the NOTE from early in the game: DEAR JOHN, SLEEP WELL. GOOD NIGHT, MOTHER. I tried SAY GOOD NIGHT (SAY GOOD also works) and the game claimed nothing happened, meaning it understood the word GOOD, even though it doesn’t represent a takeable object of any sort. I also, separately, had tried to DROP PILLOW (one of the treasures I had) but also to no effect. You need to combine the actions: DROP PILLOW, and then SAY GOOD NIGHT.
Not moon logic! Not the greatest of puzzles, either — there should always be an indicator if you have half of a solution so you know you are on the right track — but not completely arbitrary either.
The bag can incidentally be used to scoop up the rock dust from earlier, which is otherwise too fine to pick up.
Proceeding onward, there’s another area with some *HONEY*, and a crack. I was able to open the crack but only because I had previously extracted the verb list, and this is how I found WI stands for WIDEN.
Probably the only time we’ll see a game that requires this verb.
The room past the crack has some *SPICES*. With the honey and spices in hand we can go out of the cave (from a western exit) and find ourselves blocked by a bear. If you throw the honey he eats it and is still hungry (and of course being a treasure that is a bad thing). The spices scare the bear off:
Past the bear is … er, whoops!
HELP informs us our decision to push the button earlier may not have been wise.
Even given the trolling, I admit I loved this moment. I anticipated already that blowing up a rocket with an unseen missile seemed unlikely to be helpful, and the game already had shown the HELP command (which encouraged pushing the button) to be a bit of a trickster.
This is true of the very first room. Climbing the tree gets you eaten (by the tree).
Re-doing everything and passing by the button:
Here the game switches to sci-fi setting.
There’s a “mysterious puddle of water creeping around the room” early on that you can destroy by throwing the sponge from earlier in the game. Close to that is an experimental lab with a flask, which gets used right away when you hop in another side room and have the door seal shut behind you.
You eventually find a teleporter which leads to an engine room, and can start the engines, then go back to a control room to launch, and have the entire rocket blow up.
For whatever reason the self-destruct system has also been activated but only triggers upon launch (or maybe it is a long enough timer it takes travel into space for it to be meaningful); that can be taken care of with another button.
If you try to go back out the airlock, things don’t go well, as you’re in orbit.
For some reason this spelling made me laugh.
The teleporter has been redirected to the planet you are orbiting, instead.
To get anywhere on the icy surface you need to throw the “rock dust” for traction, and yes, that’s very easy to miss if you weren’t ready for that. (Back at least a saved game slot! At least the game has saving!)
Notice how, in a real-universe sense, we have completely stranded ourselves on a single island on a faraway planet with only our 9 treasures to keep us company. Maybe dragon eggs are edible.
I admit I appreciated the near-twist to the ending, and felt like it matched the general theming of the HELP command with attitude and other troll-like events. I realize, in an absolute “do I recommend this” sense, the answer is quite definitely no, and if I came up with a rating system (perhaps with a clever acronym, someone want to make one up for me?) this would score near the bottom on essentially every metric, but that’s not really the point of me playing this kind of game in the first place. Usually there’s something interesting and different and memorable in even the most out-there of games, and being given wrong advice by what normally is a meta-command surely qualifies; even the snarky narrator of the Infocom version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t go that far. The closest I can think of a similar trick being pulled is the Ice-Pick Lodge game The Void, and given the company responsible is mostly famous for Pathologic, this clearly dives into territory only explorable by avant-garde Russians and fast-typing 14-year-olds.
So I unstuck myself from the parser issues, had reasonably smooth sailing, then ran into more parser issues.
The first thing I tried was test something Voltgloss theorized, that HELP was not just a “meta” verb but an essential one. We’ve had, for instance, absolutely essential information given by the HELP command but not by the “proper in-universe” portion of the game.
Having tested enough times, I’d say it is more the traditional meta-shtick, although the game does a pretty good job of customizing the message for the location.
Typing HELP here says THAT SAND MIGHT COME IN HANDY.
Trying to go east and typing HELP again, though, indicates otherwise:
This is enough to indicate to me this is a “you got trapped” gag, not an actual puzzle.
Up next is the second hole, with the magic word AYUDAME. I was unable to get out of the hole while holding the rope, as I was trying things like THROW ROPE and the like, and just going UP didn’t work. The key was simply to be going UP while holding the rope and the game would let you use the rope automatically (mind you, I not sure what specific action the avatar is really taking).
From the HELP in this room, which led me to suspect I simply needed the right verb and the magic word was saved for later.
I had already marked on my map there was a tree where an attempt at using CLIMB failed because I lacked climbing equipment. With rope in hand I immediately tested CLIMB again (this time, not UP — yes, the parser is inconsistent) and was able to find an oil lamp hanging out on the top of the tree. Where they often tend to be found.
The result of trying HELP here. This is honestly where the flavor of the game is, it’s otherwise fairly straightforward sci-fi-fantasy blend.
The magic word AYUDAME, incidentally, I started testing in each and every room, marking as I went, before hitting paydirt in an entirely random place: the front of the cave immediately after getting bitten by leeches.
I knew I next needed to resolve the antiseptic bottle (the one where OPEN and APPLY and so forth didn’t work), and finally resorted to poking open the source code (or rather, in this case, the machine code file that needs to be run before the BASIC one). Here’s what I’ve come up with (this includes some information from later in this play session).
NO, SO, EA, WE, UP, DO, (directions)
GE, (get)
DR, (drop)
CH, (chop)
TH, (throw)
CL, (probably clean?)
SP, (spray)
RE, (read)
EX, (examine)
SAY, (say)
PU, (push)
SH, (shoot)
WI, (don’t know)
SM, (seems to be also open?)
OP, (open)
LI, (light)
UN, (unlight)
SAV, (save)
HEL, (help)
IN, (inventory)
SC, (score)
Using the key (and making sure I had a lit lamp) I was able to find and enter two locked doors in the cave. One led to a TRS-80 with the message PRESS THE BUTTON TO FIRE MISSILE.
The other contains the actual button to fire the aforementioned missile. The funny thing structurally is I pushed the button first and found what it did after.
No idea where the rocket is and what happens if you don’t destroy it.
Exploring around a little more I found a rock with the message DING-A-LING; saying DING revealed a *ring*, one of the treasures. I also came across a bigger rock blocking my way, some oars, and a boat at an underground lake.
Historically, text adventures have been awful at boat control, and this game is no different. I had already dumped the verb list and nothing seemed close to helping, until I finally realized the boat was portable enough I could just pick it up, and walking NORTH into the lake while holding the boat was considered equivalent to using it.
Just a bit past that are a LASER PISTOL, some BATTERIES (needed to operate the pistol), and a *SOFT PILLOW* (another treasure).
I was able to to take the pistol back to the large rock blocking my way and shoot it.
Now, though I’ve found myself stuck in the room immediately after.
HELP gives a message about there being a hidden switch in the hole, but I have no item that seems to help with the cause of pushing it (or at least none that the parser will recognize; you’d think the sickle has a long end so you could flip it around to push whatever’s in there). Given how arbitrary the magic word use was I suspect I’ve missed a hidden object and I need to comb back over the rooms I’ve been in.
Robert S. French is another one of the teenaged computer experts (like Stepka with Castle Fantasy, and Goodman with Building of Death) that wrote one adventure game amidst their tech-savvy early life and went on to prominence in a field other than games. In Mr. French’s case he has his name on 18 different patents related to parallel computing and now works at SETI in astronomy research. His most recent paper he lists as Orbits and Resonances of the Regular Moons of Neptune.
From Robert’s own web page he lists this period — prior to starting a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at MIT — as working at Various Companies from Louisville, Kentucky.
Implemented accounting and inventory software for several companies. Managed a small programming department at a mail-order company. Developed a new BASIC interpreter that was sold with the ChromaTRS color graphics board for the TRS-80. Developed dozens of utilities and games for the TRS-80 that were sold commercially. Developed some of the first shareware for the Amiga, including a well-regarded Mandelbrot set exploration system. Tutored students in programming concepts.
There were a number of “color conversions” for the basic black-and-white TRS-80, including one from a company in Canada sold in 1979, although the most prominent was ChromaTRS, which started being sold for Model I and Model III computers in 1982.
French’s contribution was writing CHROMA BASIC. From the manual:
CHROMA BASIC is a new program for use with a CHROMAtrs (T.M.} COLOR ADD-ON. Included in the CHROMA BASIC program are many, easy-to-use, graphics commands that can either be written into any Basic program or used independently.
His heavy familiarity with machine code interfaces explains a bit of technical oddity to today’s game, Strange Adventure, rather optimistically entitled Adventure #1 (there was no Adventure #2). In order to run it you need to first run an assembly language file which stays in memory (and seems to handle some parser aspects) before loading a BASIC file to run the game. You also need to crank the memory to 64560 when prompted for “Memory Size”. (I needed help from the trs80gp Discord group to puzzle this out, and George Phillips — one of the trs80gp co-authors — worked out the issue. Thanks!)
Regarding the “American Software Co.” label, Mr. French sold some other software by this name, mainly arcade clones.
It is, as the instructions say, another treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures. This time there’s more than one, and the first one is in the very first room of the game.
Typing GET JEWEL has the game respond I DON’T SEE IT HERE which isn’t a great first impression. You’re supposed to GET SICKLE and then CHOP TREE.
THE JEWEL HAS FALLEN OUT OF THE TREE.
And that’s the only treasure I’ve seen so far. I’m stuck pretty early, in one case almost surely on a parser issue, with other puzzles I’m not sure. Here’s the lay of the land so far, zoomed out:
There’s a “jungle path” that passes through, marked in green; you start on the far east and there are “branches” along the way.
The first branch has a crowbar and a sponge out in the open, and a cryptic note.
This area also has some quicksand that doesn’t kill you right away, so it might be a puzzle, or it might just be a time-wasting trap.
I haven’t fully caught the vibe yet which option (ignore, or it is a puzzle) I should expect.
The next area has traffic you can kill yourself on…
…and then there’s a dead end. You can drop down a hole to find a rope (and no verb I’ve tried lets me use the rope to get back) and a magic word on a wall.
I have yet to try this in every single room, but I worry the game might be coded so you have to see the word before it works.
Finally, trying to go farther west forces you to cross a stream with leeches. The leeches bite you and after enough time the bites become infected and you die.
Fortunately, there’s a cave just past the stream with with SOLARCAINE ANTISEPTIC that ought to work. Unfortunately, no verb I’ve tried has worked for using the bottle. What I did discover is that the verb is a two-letter parser; that is, if you type DRINK BOTTLE the game turns it into DR BO, thinks you meant DROP BOTTLE, and the bottle now appears on the screen, confusing someone (like myself) who didn’t realize the parser limits yet). And yes, I realize the antiseptic ought to be applied topically, but I haven’t found a command that actually does that.
Also, if you go deeper into the cave and try to do any command, you trip over a rock and die, presumably due to lack of light.
My attempt at making a verb list at the moment is consequently an absolute mess:
I can tell easily, for instance, that WEAR is being parsed as WEST and RESET is being parsed as READ. However, I’m not clear about “CL” — the game gives a vague response, so it might be CLEAN (especially given the sponge) but maybe it is CLOSE instead? I’ll have to keep investigating. “SM” on any object I’ve tried says that the object is not a door, but is SMASH the most logical verb then? I could of course plunge into the source code but I’m not at that level of desperation yet, even though I have the nagging feeling the bottle solution might involve an unmentioned noun (that is, something like CURE BITES even though the BITES aren’t given as a specific target).
Renga in Blue 