Moon House Technician is written in Rexx. I remember Rexx from IBM’s OS/2 days.
I have tried to get Rexx or an interpreter running on my Win11 laptop. After spending all morning in the effort, I still have no joy. Unfortunately, I am traveling for the next 10 days. I am stuck with Win11 until I return home. I am pretty sure I can get it running on my RPi or Risc-V computers.
Until then, can anyone suggest a way to play Moon House Tech? Currently, it is the only game in the comp that doesn’t have any ratings.
See my response in Amanda’s review thread at Amanda Plays ParserComp - #10 by Warrigal. Once installed, it’s pretty painless. It works for me in 64-bit Windows 7, but I’m sure it will work in Windows 11.
Programming the game in REXX was an intentional design choice as a nod to the earliest mainframe text adventure games of my childhood as well as being the language that I learned at twelve to write my first (and long-lost) text adventure game. While we were aware of the possible implications of offering it in this format, it was surprising to note the interest on intfiction.org. We thank you for providing that extra push that elevated Moon-house Technician to the next level.
We immediately got to work on porting it over through C++, and now anybody with a Windows machine may play it as a single executable! No extra downloads. We would be appreciative to anybody who would give it a go as it became a sort of labour of love and brief obsession.
I downloaded the Windows executable, but got the error “The program can’t start because MSVCP140D.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.”
What do I need to download to fix this? I’m guessing that it’s one of the Microsoft Visual C++ redistributables. I’ve got them all up to version 14.32.31332.0 dated 2022. Maybe something later?
Thank you @Warrigal for notifying me of this problem. The Windows version executable should now be fixed and fully playable. My apologies for the trouble.
I would like to notice, that it is a file from MS Visual C++ and is required only for Debug version of the executables. The Release version requires standard MSVCP140.dll from Visual C++ redistributable package.
I can confirm that. Last night I tried it in my rpi400 I have at job for doing stuff during long boring nightshifts. It turned out that there’s a regina rexx interpreter in the standard repository so even me. definitely not a linux person, could install it with the GUI add/remove software menu in a matter of seconds. Then I just opened a terminal and typed “regina Moon-house_Technician.rexx” and… that was it!
I’ve tried to run it with the classic Amiga ARexx interpreter just for fun, but that didn’t work, as Moonhouse uses a lot of times several functions as Beep or Sleep that are not inmplemented in the Amiga. Their lines could easylly be manually deleted or commented, but the efforth wasn’t worth it.
Other than that, it’s a very unconventional parser work that doesn’t adhere to classic parser-game traditions, which is likely to get purists mad, but it makes me feel intrigued… I played for a while untill I was dropped out from the Moonhouse when the guy in charge decided that I was spending much of my time admiring the view from the moon-windows instead of doing some more productive stuff I’ll give it a second go one of theses nights
From what I know ARexx is fully featured and is mainly used to cooperate with other programs. For example Deluxe Paint 5 program has so called ARexx port which allows to write scripts and macros in ARexx that automate all the actions (like drawing, selecting color etc.) and also allows the communication between different programs with these ports.
Back on topic I didn’t use original Rexx, and it is interesting to see a text-adventure game written using this language. It seems to have all the needed constructions.
I am pretty sure I can get it running on my RPi or Risc-V computers.
