It’s so impressive that you’re putting in all this work! I’ve never played a Level 9 game, but I find this reverse-engineering fascinating.
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Come to think of it, reverse engineering is a similar voyage of discovery combined with solving puzzles that playing an adventure game is!
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I was just wondering if the Level 9 preservation project was still being worked on?
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Yes! 
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Stephan, could you possibly ask the Austins about the possibility of making the reference guides and documents available to the community in advance while the preservation projects continues? So that the community may start becoming acquainted with the knowledge and stuff and, maybe, be ready for the A-code compilers and whatever software the system is made of when the preservation process is over and publicly githubbed? This is just knowledge-anxiety, I know, but I just can’t help! Having the ‘manuals’ released beforehand, writers might start writing or, at least, designing… aaaaaargh! Rgds++++++
You guys may or not agree, but text adventure production is very much biased by the fact that we (my own case, anyways), old-school adventure writers of the 80s (now mature 50ers or even older), can’t sort of ‘understand’ modern programming paradigms and we must sort of be able to ‘look at’ source code and somehow feel comfortable with what we read. I sincerely believe that’s the reason why we oldies crave for old-school languages and programming styles. I just can’t get to terms with the inform dialect, nor with other systems such as tads or even adventuron, because my brains is not programming oriented. However, when I look at the source code of snowball or worm, I may not be able to extract information directly but my brains do not reject the language: it looks like basic and, as far as I fill the gaps of the missing info, I know the code is just a question of creating code blocks/subroutines and design the flow. The Austins may surprise at the fact that people want to use a 40 year old system to release new games today but the fact is that text adventuring is an old art and old systems were less capable than the moderns but who cares! We will use it to produce new stuff, won’t we? Consider DAAD: it’s thriving, ain’t it?
Or just an appetizer, at least…
Sure, I absolutely get your point and I can ask for it. It is up to Mike though to decide so I cannot promise it. He controls the pace, the projects scope and progress.
Hmmm. I actually think adventuron is extremely simple and straightforward. More like updated, modern ScottKit, actually. I’d have used that had there existed a version specifically built for Raspberry Pi, instead of having generic browser format.
Have you tried ScottKit? If so, then try adapting the logic to Adventuron.
PS: it’s too late for me as I’m too deep into TACK. In the process, I think I just figured out how to have a standard library for ScottKit, but I’ll need to consult DM6 for that.
PPS: I have been distracted by my new Chromebook and its Screencast feature, to put up daily chess games and puzzles videos on YouTube. As you can imagine, that takes a humongous chunk of time, albeit less now that I’ve settled into a routine. An (un)fortunate consequence of somebody 
telling me to practice chess everyday. I did get to 1437 rating, which is the top 5% of chess.com players.
Just adding another thread from the BBC Micro community, where they’re analysing version 1 of the Level 9 engine…
…and the GitHub for the project…
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Hi there! Wondering, any info update on the level 9 tools eventual release?
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Just discovered this thread. It would be great if there would be tools for level 9’s KAOS engine too as well but that may be wishful thinking?
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I don’t think KAOS has ever been fully formalised, and I’m not even sure there was a real system that was consistent between games. When I asked Pete Austin many years back, he explained it this way: “This was the first adventure system where non-player characters had their own independent lives (they followed what we called ‘racetracks’) and where you could tell them to do complex things.”
But let’s wait what Mike Austin might add.
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I actually haven’t catched up with Mike in a long time as he controls the pace and wanted it to be done “when it’s done”. Will write him an email but as earlier already stated, I can’t promise anything unfortunately.
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I don’t think KAOS has ever been fully formalised, and I’m not even sure there was a real system that was consistent between games.
The way I understand it, the KAOS engine wasn’t really its own engine, but more of an extension of A-Code. A very complex extension that still boggles my mind with how powerful it was, but an extension nonetheless.
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Does anyone know how Level 9 managed to reuse the location descriptions in Snowball?
Did they use extra variables to keep track of the deck and disc numbers?
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How goes this project?
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Also interested!
I would say the project is on hold unfortunately. I haven’t heard from Mike now in a very long time. WIll prepare an email but currently life has different plans for me than chasing engines for old computer systems.
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@8bit_era Could you please also ask if the Austins can give their permission for others to reverse engineer their system and/or create new games from it?
I’m guessing they wouldn’t mind people doing the former for educational purposes, but might not be okay with the distribution of those findings and/or resulting code.
It would be nice to get their blessing whilst they are still available to ask.
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