My pastiche/tribute to the works of (in no particular order) Scott Adams and William Shakespeare is finished and ready for testing:
ROTTEN ADVENTURE aka GHOST KING the greatest literary text adventure of 1980 that never was
Testers using modern interpreters like scottfree welcome. Bonus points if you have convenient ways to bash it into an 8-bit Adams interpreter of your choice and report on results. So far I’ve tried to keep all printed messages to <=39 columns, but I would be curious to hear how it appears on the even-tinier screens of the classic SA platforms.
Appreciation (however grudging and/or incomplete) for the peculiar styles of both authors is a plus but not a requirement.
Input also welcome from Adams enthusiasts on matters like “does this make too much sense?” and “does this include a high enough chance of arbitrary, unfair death?” (So far there are only two situations with a mandatory chance of random demise.)
Sample of the kind of compromises in storytelling and detail you can expect in the screenshot below.
Regarding printed message lengths; the original games (at least the ones available in .dat format) mostly adhered to the 64 characters per line limitation of the TRS-80 Model I. Not sure if that’s something you’d want to stick to or not.
Does anybody within the sound of my voice know what iFiction is using to make its SA/Howarth titles web-playable? It’s not clearly documented where I can find it…
I can’t think of anything that makes it easy at the moment.
(I mean, technically one could probably compile ScottFree into WebAssembly using emscripten and use something like “ImTui” (https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui) for the user interface, but i don’t know how much effort that would require. That would be a neat solution though.)
…not terribly helpful right now, but I’m working on getting a SA web interpreter using xterm.js instead. At first i tried compiling ScottFree to WASM, but that was too complicated. Trying to hook it up to an unfinished SA interpreter written in Go using websockets instead. It’ll be nice, but I don’t know how long it will take me to get ready
