Ascape ------ (C) David Lodge November 2005 Basic player for the Adventurescape games. Including win32 based executable. The Adventurescape system was given away on a cover disc for A&B Computing in 1985. There were the following games released using it: Game Database Works ------------------------------------------------------ 2002: A Space Oddity 1 yes The Island 1 yes Jungle Quest 1.1 yes The Pobjoy Special 1.1 yes The Silicon Jungle 1.1 yes Live Aid Magical Mystery Tour 1.1 yes The Snow Queen 1.1 yes Anthrosin 1.1 yes Creepy Adventure 1.1 yes Lost in Xanadu 1.1 yes Murder at the Abbey 2 yes Dungeon Adventure 2 yes Amnesia! 1.5 yes The Cube of Zoth ? no The Ultimate Prize HATRACK no Pirate's Peril HATRACK no Dreamtime HATRACK no The Taroda Scheme HATRACK no Stranded! HATRACK no Stranded! BEEBRACK no Rise in Crime HATRACK no Ascape can be used to dump the dictionary or to play the game. Currently this can only be specified on the command line. The command line is: ascape [dump] If you specify 'dump' then the database will be dumped to standard out and will not be interpreted. The version 2 games use a separate messages and locations file which are referenced within the main file, these should be placed in the current directory. For the curious the only difference between version 1 of the database and version 1.1 is that an integer is used to saved the score for winning, rather than a byte. Version 1.5 is similar to 1.1 but things are mangled around a bit so that the room data and messages can be read directly from disc. As I don't know the licence details on the games; finding them is left as an exercise to the reader. (hint: Stairway to Hell and The BBC Lives). Once found; the necessary files can be extracted from the disc images (I used DFS explorer). The required files are: Version 1,1.1 Data and Init Version 1.5 Data, Init, Messages, Locations, Message pointer, Locations pointer Version 2.0 Data, Init, Messages and Locations The Messages and Locations files are pointed to in the data file (all you need to do is remove the $. from the front.) With version 1.5 the pointer files are preceded with an "I." Bugs and Stuff to be done ------------------------- * Saving and Loading games isn't supported yet (should be easy all the work is already done!) * Get the other database versions working (version 1.1 complete 27/11/05) (version 1.5 complete 28/11/05) * Work out the Heyley software game format * More debug codes built in * Replace the output and input with a more abstract way, thus allowing easy GUIfication * Do real CLI work instead of guessing - including error checking * Split the source into separate files: * main (initalise the structures and load database) * database (load and print database) * interact (interact: print and input) * engine (the nuts and bolts of the engine) * Remove local data from the structures * Dual play through all games to ensure lack of bugs