Thanks Lynn, but I never MET a salesman as far as I know, and never attained a rank higher than Sandusky Stablehand. (I did once get outside of the building enclosing the cell but I don’t remember much about the terrain outside).
damn page breaks.
You’re right, Lynn–Phantasie II was released in the states (briefly), but it wasn’t released for whatever computer was handiest for me at the time (Commodore? Tandy?).
However, Phantasie III for the PC (a whopping 175kB) can be found at:
http://www.abandonworld.com/rpg.html
along with Moebius (262kB,) Don’t Go Alone (300kB,) and a veritable monster of a program called MegaTraveller II (1.69MB.)
-David
Abandonware–Public Domain or Pirated Goods?
Umph. You needed to go into black circles. This is probably your problem. I think there was a closet in that building with a circle in it. The circles would warp you into other areas.
I just beat Hitchhiker’s last year. I bought a copy off the net for about $3 and ran it on an old 386 I had lying around for lag time realism. I just checked out the emulator, and now I’m hooked on the text-based games all over again!
Between 1979 and 1983, I WROTE 21 different text-based adventure games for the old TRS-80 model 1.
Without the aid of any wimpy “adventure construction set” program, either. These were written in TRS-80 Level II BASIC, with a machine-language parsing routine so the game would execute at a reasonable speed. And they all fit in 16K of memory and didn’t require a floppy disk drive (you could load them in off of cassette tape).
Three of these 21 games – The Vial of Doom, Medieval Space Warrior, and The Last City – were pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. A game publisher actually took an interest in The Vial of Doom. The publisher was coming out with a book filled with source code for TRS-80 adventure games. Sadly, my program reached his office 3 days after the publication deadline, so The Vial of Doom didn’t get to appear in the publisher’s adventure game book.
3 days. That’s all it would have taken. 3 fewer days. How different my life would be now, if only I’d been 3 days faster…
Mine were:
Oregon Trail
Loderunner
Montezuma’s Revenge
and #1: Karateka!!!
Jman
Nothing happens… 
[hollow voice]
Man! I hate it when that happens.
[/hollow voice]
-David
What many of you youngsters are calling “Apple Adventure” was actually written on the PDP-series of Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers way back in 1972. It is most properly referred to as Willy Crowther and Don Woods’ original Adventure, or simply as ADVENT (the PDP operating systems only allowed 6-character executable filenames).
“Apple Adventure” was merely a port of the Crowther and Woods Adventure to the Apple ][. There was a similar port to the TRS-80, to various CP/M based systems, and to the IBM PC when the PC finally came out.
Now Loderunner, there was a classic that really did come out on the Apple ][ first!
I think it’s a port of the original, anyway…is the original the four-hundred-and-something-point version?
Got it here on CD somewhere–now I’m gonna have to find it.
Sleepless nights, here I come!
-David
SoulFrost wrote:
Nope. Every “true” port of the original PDP-series version is a 350 point game.
SPOILER FOR ORIGINAL ADVENTURE BELOW
… The final (lousy) point comes from picking up the issue of Spelunker Today magazine and depositing it in Witt’s End. Some ports give you a hint: saying “READ MAGAZINE” will tell you, “It’s addressed to Witt’s End!”. However, the original only responds with, “I’m afraid the magazine is written in Dwarvish.”
Dang! That means that my copy’s a later port…
It was the Pirate, I tell you!
-David