README.txt (1859B)
1 The Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure is a text adventure game in the 2 spirit of similar games that ran on 8-bit microcomputers of the 1970s 3 and 80s or the more ambitious Colossal Cave adventure that originally 4 only ran on mainframes and minicomputers. 5 6 The plot and game should be self-explanatory. Figuring it out is the 7 point of the game. 8 9 I started writing it in BASIC but some things were very awkward to do 10 efficiently in Apple 1 BASIC. I also considered writing it in assembly 11 language, but ended up writing it in C because the excellent CC65 12 assembler worked very well for me. 13 14 It was written to run on the Apple Replica 1 although it is in 15 portable C and should run on any system with a C compiler (I did most 16 of the development and testing on a Linux system). 17 18 Because it was intended to run on the Replica 1 it was kept small and 19 efficient to run within the 32K memory limit and only use uppercase 20 characters and fit on a 40x24 character screen. Some code looks a 21 little unusual because it makes some optimizations for size and speed, 22 e.g. chars instead of ints, pre versus post increment/decrement. It is 23 a little too big to fit in an 8K EEPROM. It also won't run on an 24 original Apple 1 with 4K of memory but I am willing to port it if 25 someone sends me a system :-) 26 27 The source is included and under an Apache license so you can modify 28 and adapt the code if you wish. Much of the code is data-driven and 29 could be used to implement an entirely different adventure just by 30 changing the map, strings, and some of the logic that handles special 31 actions. 32 33 Oh and by the way, the farm described here is based on a real 34 farmhouse where my father lived many years ago, right down to the 35 layout of most of the rooms. And I also have grandson who was 36 almost 3 years old at the time I wrote this. 37 38 Jeff Tranter <tranter@pobox.com> 39 http://jefftranter.blogspot.ca/