I am currently doing research for a video project I am developing for Adventure in Colossal Cave. I have just been through the archives and read the reviews on IFDB. The one thing that struck me was that the reviews are nice, but recommendations for which games to play would be better. I am looking at it from the point of view of someone with a modern Windows/Mac/Linux system.
I want collaborators to experience the game before they attempt to translate it into other media. Unfortunately, most of the games are not going to run easily on Windows 7 for example. So far, I have been able to find a Z5 of the pre-Woods version. This is nice, but I would like to find the original 350 game that was expanded by Woods and the 430 v2.5 Woods game that can be played without too much fuss.
There are other key versions I would like personally as well, but for my immediate needs those two are must haves. I would like to get as close to the originals as possible.
I see that the Adventure page on the IFDB has a download link for a lot of different versions. MSDOS applications can be played on Windows 7 using Dosbox with little difficulty.
Yes. I was hoping that maybe there was something more user-friendly in case there was a colleague not so computer savvy. Also, I was trying to figure out which were closest to the original Crowther/Woods version. Don Woods’ Adventure 2.5 is supposed to be for Windows, but the Windows compatibility feature doesn’t seem to work on Home Premium. This too requires an additional program to run an older version of Windows on W7. I am using VMware Player as I found it easier to use and it didn’t cost me $90 to upgrade so I could downgrade.
There are so many versions. Most are source code and a lot of them sound like duplicates of others. The descriptions vary in what information is given. Some have release dates and others don’t. I am also working on a spreadsheet to catalog the IF games that I have and started a page devoted to Adventure and its spin-offs, so maybe eventually I can fill in the information: author / porter, release date, source language, system, platform, etc.
Oh wait, I forgot about Gargoyle, which is the player I use now. Still, Adventure would still need to be ported to one of the platforms that Gargoyle plays.
I wish I knew more about FORTRAN or C and wasn’t just starting out with Inform. I’d try and port the Woods versions to Z8 myself.
Pretty much all of the builds that will run directly on Windows, either as a Windows console mode program or an MS-DOS program, are in this directory at the IF-Archive:
For the original pre-Woods version, there is this Windows build: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/adv_crowther_win.zip. This runs fine directly on Windows 7 (I’ve just tested it) - I built it myself when Dennis Jerz turned up the pre-Woods source code back in 2007.
http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/advent25.zip is Don Woods’ Adventure 2.5. This is compiled as an MS-DOS program (as are many of the older builds of Adventure here), which can’t be run on 64-bit Windows 7, which is what I assume you’re using. I suspect that if you set up a 32-bit Windows 7 install it will just work, but I don’t have one to hand to test.
For versions ported to more modern systems, the best options are:
I have just spent the last few hours trying to consolidate all of the entries for the various Adventure games on my spreadsheet. It was dragging on and I knew I had a bunch of duplicates. I decided to sort by file name. I had three files with the same name but each was different. Then I realized the IF Archives could have these in different directories and it wouldn’t be a problem. Some of these are different only by a little bit. And some are for some systems I’ve never heard of and look as if they were rarely used.
I sent an email to Mr. Woods remarking about the irony of the oldest version of Adventure has been ported to a modern player. I have installed XP in my VMware Player and Gargoyle. And I did realize after reading all of the entries, that Return to Colossal Cave wasn’t a remake, but a reconstruction.
So, someone already created a tree. Yes the article on the variants is very helpful. This speeds things up quite a bit. I need to play the game myself again to refresh my memory and create a storyboard. I am considering Woods’ 430 point game, but that might make the video too long.