Scott Adams, Infocom and the VIC

[Tamurello]

Hey!

First Post. Forgive me
As you know, Infocom never released any adventures for the VIC. Scott Adams did five. He told me once, that he "struggled to fit it in 5k!" <- One of the few who knew that the VIC had 5k, not just those 3511 Bytes... (<-- Edited: 3583! I was in the C64 mode! )
Anyway I did foolishly asked him to remake one or some of his classics, namely Pirate Adventure, Voodoo Castle and The Count. I had the PC in mind and he agreed. As for every hobby coder, real life is an issue. So the project went on hiatus. After time I myself considered the project "dead" --> But then Bit Shifter came out with a splendid Z-Machine implementation: 58 (52?) columns for the C64, and a whopping 38 for the VIC. This fueled my ambitions since both 8-Bit Commodores have etched deep scratch marks into my heart.
This was a solution! I'd do it for 8-Bit!
Long story short: I'm doing a remake of Pirate Cove. Got four rooms so far and the blessings of Scott Adams himself. He doesn't know why Pirate Adventure was named Pirate Cove on the VIC. He suspects the marketing.

Anyway, have a look:

[orion70]

Great effort! Congrats on this. Is there an ETA for it? (Eagerly waiting to play )

[Kweepa]

This is very cool!
I was going to ask if you were writing it old-school with ZILF or using Inform but I see Inform in the game header
I have a soft spot for adventures on the VIC, so looking forward to it.

[lance.ewing]

Anyway I did foolishly asked him to remake one or some of his classics, namely Pirate Adventure, Voodoo Castle and The Count. I had the PC in mind and he agreed.

Scott Adams is great. I was in email contact with him about 20 years ago. At that time I asked if I could create a remake of Mission Impossible using the Sierra On-Line AGI 3D animated adventure game system, and he said yes. At that time I was very much into reverse engineering the AGI system and had built some editor tools for building such games that would run on that engine. I got quite a bit into creating the game. I clearly remember creating this great animation of the main character dragging the dead body around with him, and I was working on the room with the projector and projector screen when work was paused for a while. And then I ended up losing everything on that PC, which was a real shame. This was kind of before I was in the habit of using source control for hobby projects, or even regularly copying things to floppy disks.

Anyway, I'm also a big Scott Adams adventure fan and looking forward to seeing what you create.

[jcompton]

So these are elaborations/expansions on the original games and not straight Z-Machine ports? Those have been hanging around for a long time, ala http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/ ... inform.zip .

[Tamurello]

Thanks for the replies!
This is a pure weekend project, so it might take some time to finish. ZILF looks promising, but is far from being complete - so I use Inform 6.15 Lib 6/2, the last one which could compile to Infocom Version 3. This one here is coded on a real Amiga 1200 (no kidding!) so nope, no straight port from the original games. It's a complete rewrite. And Impossible Mission in AGI?! Heh, that would be cool too!
Forgot to mention that a 32K memory expansion and a floppy disk drive are mandatory for Pirate Cove!

[orion70]

I think that nowadays every serious Denialer has a +32K RAM expansion and a real disk drive, and/or a SD2IEC device. So it's not big issue, the big issue is: when will it be ready? (just joking )

[Tamurello]

Friday afternoon, just firing up that ol' Amiga, Orion!

And for all who know and love Scott, good news: He and his new company, Clopas, are working on 'Adventureland XL' for the upcoming 40th anniversary.
Guess what? It's a text-adventure!
Check this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LRTnek2njA4

That's why I'm doing Pirate Adventure. :p

[ScottAdams]

Wonderful to read the comments on this thread.

Happy Adventuring all!

Scott Adams

[Tamurello]

Hrm.

[edededdy]

Hey!

First Post. Forgive me
As you know, Infocom never released any adventures for the VIC. Scott Adams did five. He told me once, that he "struggled to fit it in 5k!" <- One of the few who knew that the VIC had 5k, not just those 3511 Bytes... (<-- Edited: 3583! I was in the C64 mode! )
Anyway I did foolishly asked him to remake one or some of his classics, namely Pirate Adventure, Voodoo Castle and The Count. I had the PC in mind and he agreed. As for every hobby coder, real life is an issue. So the project went on hiatus. After time I myself considered the project "dead" --> But then Bit Shifter came out with a splendid Z-Machine implementation: 58 (52?) columns for the C64, and a whopping 38 for the VIC. This fueled my ambitions since both 8-Bit Commodores have etched deep scratch marks into my heart.
This was a solution! I'd do it for 8-Bit!
Long story short: I'm doing a remake of Pirate Cove. Got four rooms so far and the blessings of Scott Adams himself. He doesn't know why Pirate Adventure was named Pirate Cove on the VIC. He suspects the marketing.

Anyway, have a look:

The five Scott Adams cartridges were 16k in size, plus ram of around 5k total.

Ed

[Kweepa]

Andy Finkel at Commodore did the VIC-20 programming.
I just poked around the Adventureland cartridge contents and there's no text compression, so there's plenty of room for optimization, but it probably wasn't worth it because it wouldn't have been easy to squeeze into an 8k cart anyway

[orion70]

So maybe the VIC version could have been a little more verbose.. I always found AL (and the other two) a bit too succinct. It detracted from atmosphere.

[Kweepa]

Agreed! It made the games feel more like puzzles and less like adventures.

[Tamurello]

edededdy:

That may well be true. But that's what Scott told me. Perhaps his memory faded after all this years. Ask him yourself, he has an account here.