You can play for a few minutes and simply stop responding, and then come back hours or days later and pick up right where you left off, for as long as Swenson keeps the server running. Near as I can tell, the original code didn't display in all-caps like the Colossal Cave Python bot, but playing it via text is a genuinely cool experience. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. (ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER) SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? If you text +1 (669) 238-3683, the server will respond after a few seconds with the opening spiel of Colossal Cave Adventure: Like, well, responding by SMS.Īrt from the ZX Spectrum version of Adventure. It was only designed to work for this one piece of software, not all FORTRAN IV code, but it does that job, along with adding some modern touches. Swenson's interpreter ended up being more complicated than the original code it was designed to interpret, but efficiency isn't really the goal with a fun project like this one. Then he talks about simulating "loading the tape drive" for the PDP-10, which is of course just a text file now. Swenson talked about what it was like to deal with the 36-bit code at about the 11 minute mark, which is probably my favorite part of the presentation. And even if there was one, we don't have a PDP-10 to run it on." "You can't actually take FORTRAN IV and compile it these days. "It was a fun challenge to get this to work at all," he said in the talk. Notably, FORTRAN IV predated the standard of 8 bits in a byte. Specifically, Swenson was dealing with FORTRAN IV code, common in supercomputers of the day but unused for decades now. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command ' xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in games such as Minesweeper" (Wikipedia article on Interactive fiction, accessed 04-15-2009).Other parts of Swenson's talk are a bit easier to follow, and there's something really cool in translating a game as old as Colossal Cave into a more modern programming language. The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 5.0 OS. "In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet, and has survived on the Internet to this day. ( See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words." (Wikipedia article on Colossal Cave Adventure, accessed 04-14-2009). "Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. "Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge." The game was renamed Colossal Cave Adventure, as it was based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. In 19 spelunker and programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, William Crowther wrote the first computer text adventure game, Adventure.Īdventure was originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system.
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