Ghost King, a Scott Adams Literary Adventure Diversion (S.A.L.A.D.)

No, but there is documentation for The Adventure System that is compatible with version 8.3 of Scott Adams’ interpreter:
https://mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=advsystem

Apart from separating occurs from actions, did you have to make other changes to make it compatible with the TRS-80 interpreter?

Quotation marks in strings (`), and line breaks within strings are done by LF (0A) and CR(0D) on the outside.
Here’s what I remember, it’s a long time ago…

And I forgot to say we need to complete the Header (0: The number of bytes required to contain the text of the verbs, nouns, messages, room descriptions and object descriptions.) and Trailer (security checksum).
A TRS-80 screenshot:
ghost_king

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TRS80 compatibility issue filed on the ScottKit tracker.

No, but for these calculations, checksum and size value, it is interesting to look at the Basic versions of the Adams interpreter.
You should find this on The Big List of TRS-80 Software

I’ve posted a review of this game on IFDB.

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I appreciate it. As a sidebar, do you have a take on the Cruelty rating I submitted? By the letter of the law, Polite seems to require UNDO and that’s simply not available, but it seems overall more Polite than Cruel (the other most applicable setting).

Even the last treasure is still technically available from Horatio while you’re actively dying of poison…

I’m not sure. I think that Polite rather presumes the existence of UNDO, and without it I don’t think Ghost King quite fulfils the criteria. The rules as written on IFDB seem strangely misordered to me, since I would think it more polite to let the player know when they’re about to do something irrevocable, rather than when they’ve already done it (UNDO or no UNDO). For this reason, I’m not sure whether any of the ratings are a perfect fit for Ghost King, but perhaps Tough is a less misleading descriptor than Polite.

There’s no obvious warning that Ophelia is about to trip you up, for example, or that the platform is slippery.

I hear you. I’ve always had the impression that if forced to choose between “do you want this scale to warn you about arbitrary death, or about creating unwinnable states?”, the scale and its users want the latter. And there, I was very careful to protect the player, you can’t drink the water too soon or find out at the end of the game that willing the kingdom to Voltimand was a bad choice, etc.

But, I would also happily bow to an edit on its page if anybody has a better slot for it. The scale just doesn’t seem very well-suited to Adams mechanics.

You might like to read this article by Zarf in which he rethinks his Cruelty Scale, but even the revised version assumes a level of UNDO. I would suggest going with your gut on this one, since it’s a bit of a special case. I agree with you that unwarned unwinnable states are less desirable than unwarned deaths.

Yeah, no help there, I’d read it before submitting and I even read it again just now before I replied to you to make sure that I wasn’t misremembering my conclusion. :slight_smile:

(but I take the point that maybe the conclusion really is “no UNDO? You’re at the bottom of the scale by default!”)

Even with UNDO, I’m not sure it would qualify as polite since, unless I’m mistaken, you can’t leave the Tourney Room and can enter it without the paper needed for the will.