Elf 1802 Retro Computer with Adventureland by Scott Adams

I recently built a COSMAC Elf retro computer kit. Its 8 bit CPU is an RCA 1802 from the early 70s. I had built one back at the time after reading articles in an electronics magazine. What piqued my interest was an extension ROM chip that includes Scott Adam’s Adventureland IF game.

The game runs exceptionally well for an 8 bit computer displayed in a virtual text terminal on my Raspberry Pi. The intro splash art drawn with ASCII art i incredible. The game plays just as it would on any computer with no lag or hesitation once you are into the game. It does take a minute or so to load the intro screen art.

I have inserted a couple of pictures of the assembled Elf and a screen shot of Adventureland. The kit is less than $100 and takes a couple of days to assemble. (Believe it or not, the assembled Elf will fit in an Altoids tin.)

The kit is described at the 1802 Membership Card website.

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This looks really cool, especially the 1802 chip.

Sadly, there appears no modern development software for it, such as a working C compiler.

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You are correct, assembly and BASIC are the only development options. But that is part of the nostalgia. When I built the initial version in the 70s and then an Altair shortly after, assembly was the only option. Fortunately, computing moved quickly and we can easily develop with any of 100s of programming languages on a $35 SBC.

A Z80 based RC2014 retro is another 8 bit SBC that can boot with CP/M and is much more flexible.

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Actually, there are C compilers for the 1802. There’s a version of gcc, and Bill Rowe has one for his Oldunio (an 1802 board that accepts Arduino shields).

ZRUN also exists, so you can run Infocom games (Zork etc.) on the 1802.

I should note that the RasPi’s terminal program is not handling the ANSI graphics that form the splash screen very well. All those diamonds are actually block-graphic characters.

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Hi Lee,

Welcome to Intfiction. It is nice to see someone from the Elf 1802 community here.

Jeff

PS. Lee’s Elf Membership Card is an excellent implementation of RCA’s Elf computer.

I was going to ask about which version of Adventureland is included, but I see the project website mentions there are two variations, the details of which seem to be fully documented on the GitHub page…

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Thanks, Jeff. There’s now an even smaller 1802 MemberCHIP card kit as well. It fits in an Altoids Smalls tin, and also includes Adventureland. sunrise-ev com / projects.htm#memberchip

The original Adventureland was written in BASIC. Richard converted it to assembler, and compressed it with LZW (much like Infocom did with ZRUN).

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From what Richard himself wrote on his GitHub page, it seems that he actually used his own 2019 enhanced version of Morten Lohre’s c.1993 C port of the original BASIC Adventureland as the starting point for his 1802 assembly language version.

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I built one of the first Smalls version. I have it right here on my desk.