I recently came across an old adventure game called « Adventure XT » written in 2007 by Paul Allen Panks, who was a profilic text-adventure programmer. You can find information related to Adventure XT on IFDB. There is also a Wiki here with links to several reviews.
It happens that some part of the game includes smurfs, and this caught my attention since I love smurfs.
Moreover, BASIC source code was available so I decided to try it with GW-BASIC.
The source code is close to GW-BASIC but not completely: some lines have no line numbers and some instructions are not recognised (like SLEEP ).
So I decided to modify the code to make it compatible with GW-BASIC. It wasn’t that difficult and I proceeded as follows:
- I had to renumber the BASIC line number since it was impossible to insert new lines as there was no gap between two consecutive lines. I used
renumberstatement from GW-BASIC to do that. - I had to modify the
ON...GOSUBstatement that calls subroutines which describe locations (lines 1001 to 1018). - Then I added numbers to line without numbers in order to meet GW-BASIC requirements.
- I replaced
SLEEPinstruction with the subroutine located at line30000. - I also added a new command for the player to display the map.
- I made it possible to enter commands in capital letters.
And finally I fixed a bug that prevented item drops from killing monsters (bug discovered by Carl Muckenhoupt and discussed in his review of the game)
The source code is now nice and clean, and you can open and run it this PC-BASIC. Here it is :
You can play the game now. The story is about Mordimar, an evil wizard who found the powerful Orb of Destiny. Thanks to it, he became nearly invincible. As his power grew, the life force from the surrounding forest was drained steadily, until there was almost nothing left. You have to stop Mordimar, so you set out on a quest to get the orb and bring peace back to the forest.
Nota :
- I’ve realised afterwards that the original source code was written for QuickBasic…
- I’ve also tried to port the game onto Apple II platform but there is not enough RAM available. There are more than 80 rooms in this game.