Denial

Is there already a conversion of Oregon Trail to the VIC?
I couldn't find anything in GameBase 2.0.
If not, here's one, converted from the 1975 source code.

http://www.kweepa.org/step/vic20/oregontrail.prg

Nice! I LOVE these old-school games. The idea of basing hunting and fighting bandits on how fast you type the word "bang" is pure genius

I see from wiki that it was originally an educational game, made for children to learn how hard life was in 19th century!

Nice... I'll look to add it in due course... how much RAM does it need?

8K seems to be enough (played a while, run-stopped it, and ?FRE(0) gave about 800 bytes).

Yeah, I forgot to mention I did a bunch of rearranging to make sure it fit into an 8k expansion.
There's some fascinating discussion of the game and its history here:
http://www.filfre.net/tag/the-oregon-trail/page/2/
(filfre.net is an amazing site for old-school adventure/rpg fans... I spent hours reading through the posts when I found it. (I noticed Ghislain posts in the comments there.))

Please let me know if there are any problems with the game. It relies a lot on random, state-based and situational events, so I may not have explored every code path...

Nice little game. Played it a few times until I finally got through the mountains and the winter

Bug report:
- some times text scrolls out of the screen so it cannot be read
- some times game waits for a keypress unnecessarily
-

looks like above

That's what I could find for now

I've had a couple of games and saw the "-- You Have Enough Clothing To Keep You Warm" misalignment on screen.

Looks like I have some work to do!
I fixed those two misalignments now (locally).
Do you remember when there was too much text to fit on screen?
Did the game wait for a keypress unnecessarily after eating? (It does, but is that the only place?)

I had one occasion where two events occurred I think, and there was too much text to show on the screen, so half of the first event got lost off the top. But that's the only time. Maybe a short pause after displaying event text?

Kweepa wrote: (filfre.net is an amazing site for old-school adventure/rpg fans... I spent hours reading through the posts when I found it. (I noticed Ghislain posts in the comments there.))

We're fortunate to have somebody who writes exceptionally well to chronicle computer gaming history. I discovered that website some time ago, and I'm glad I did. I particularly enjoy the Wizardry/Ultima articles from that website.

I guess i should say **SPOILER** first, or cheat or undocumented feature.

While hunting, when you hit a key to begin, all you have to do is type bang right after that and when the computer responds with "type bang" hit return, you get a kill every time.

I know this is the Vic just acting normal, but is their a way to turn this off or maybe clear the keyboard buffer just before the "type bang" message?

GreyGhost wrote:While hunting, when you hit a key to begin, all you have to do is type bang right after that and when the computer responds with "type bang" hit return, you get a kill every time.

I also noticed that - please don't turn the feature off

Ghislain - I agree. I discovered that wonderful blog months ago, and now I can't wait to read new posts

Read what he says about Epyx Summer Games (C64):

the Digital Antiquarian wrote:

But… wait, you might be saying. Surely the colorful screen shown above doesn’t always use the same three of the four colors within each tile. In fact, it doesn’t, and this introduces us to one of the keys to getting the most out of the Commodore 64: raster interrupts.

(the rest is here)

Getting the most also out of the VIC.. Pitfall anyone?

Oh, I thought I cleared the keyboard buffer before the 'type bang'. Oops. As noted on filfre.net, later versions of the game had difficulty levels for shooting...
I think I'll fix it. If you feel the need you can always hack the code (line 4505). B1=1 will win everything.

Not to bring up an old and dead topic, but does anyone have a copy of this on their pc or SD card that would be willing to share it?

I'll second this -- anyone have a copy hanging around? I'd love to get my hands on it for playing on my VIC.