Underground Adventure - a text adventure nearly 40 years in the making

Playing Project Announcements
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“You seek to undertake an epic quest for fortune and adventure, in a cave of mystical wonders deep underground. Instead, what you will encounter here is a tedious slog through the dilapidated underbelly of a major metropolitan area (probably a sewer), as you collect discarded items of dubious value and face adversaries that are more annoying than lethal. Strap in for excitement!”

It started on a TRS-80 in 1984 as a parody of the text adventure genre. Over the years I’ve been able to migrate it to newer platforms and add features, with a focus on gameplay in addition to the snark. Now Underground Adventure plays on modern versions of Windows (XP or newer) thanks to the QB64 compiler.

The game is free and I’ve attached it to this post. It’s also available for download from my blog site, along with a little personal history on the topic: https://mikescircularfile.com/adventure-of-a-past-lifetime/

My goal is to share the game with others who might find it entertaining. I’d greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

UndergroundAdventure3.zip (980.8 KB)

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You may want to upload it at IF Archive File Upload . Forum uploads aren’t really findable once the thread is buried.

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You don’t have a Mac version, eh?

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Is the original TRS-80 version of the game available for download anywhere?

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has some issues with WINE (8.0) but the major issue, whose I attribuite to WINE and/or FreeGLUT is that the top line isn’t cleared to end-of line, leading to rather confused screen.

the attribuition is from this reporting of FreeGLUT & Wine:

0024:err:gdi:CreateDCW no driver found for L":0"
freeglut (Z:\home\pigi\if\tst\uground\UADVENT3.exe): fghInitialize: CreateDC fai
led, Screen size info may be incorrect
This is quite likely caused by a bad '-display' parameter

warning whose seems consistent with the lack of clear-to-EOL glitch. So in the end, is attribuitable to gate$, not Mike Pontillo.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Thanks. I’m still “learning the ropes” around here.

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QB64 has a Mac version, so it’s possible. I just don’t have any Apple hardware to compile it.

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Last time I tried, I had trouble reading the old floppies, so it might be lost. But I’ll look to see if there’s a way.

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Thanks for that information. I never thought to test it under WINE. The display routines are rather crude, but newer versions of the QB64 compiler might rectify the issue.

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Fantastic! Really enjoyed the TRS-80 backstory.

Also;

Fairly recently, I’ve been doing some work on the TRS-80 (all models), investigating the idea of cross compiling K&R style “C”.

What i discovered is, modern tools can compile to Z80 really quite well indeed. So i had a go at writing some games in old-school “C” and compiling them for the TRS-80.

The reason i mention this is because if you were to convert your game from basic into “C”, it could compile both for TRS-80 and modern machines.

Will try to play the game later.

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QB64 converts the BASIC code to C++ before compiling, but you’re talking about straight-up C. Also, I suspect the game is currently way too large to run on a TRS-80.

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Is it possible to make the source code available? I suugest this mainly for two reasons:

  1. People might feel uneasy clicking on an exe-file.
  2. People can use QB64 to make versions for Mac or Linux.

(The code is of course your property and I fully understand if you don’t want to make it available.)

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Just curious, did you have any testers? It usually makes a big difference. If not, I can only recommend it before release, so that potential reviewers might wait for a full release. NB: I haven’t downloaded your game, just a thought.

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The various iterations have been posted on my blog for years but I don’t know how many downloads. No one’s ever reported a full playthrough. I’ve spent dozens of hours testing it during development but of course it’s always better to get outside eyes on it. I posted it on a FB Text and Graphic Adventures page a while back and received some helpful feedback there, suggesting I use more single letter shortcuts, support AGAIN as a command, and IT/THEM as objects, all of which I implemented.

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I played a bit of it. Will try more later. Enjoying the sense of humour. Quite of a lot of silly stuff is handled quite nicely (always good news). The effects are quite neat too.

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Piergiorgio, the program loads the Windows font Lucida Console and I wonder if that’s causing the VINE problem. I’ve attached a version 3.71v that uses the standard font. Can you see if this resolves the issue? If so, I’ll build a version that prompts for a font choice at runtime.

UADVENT3v.zip (762 KB)

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much better, the output is no more confused. albeit the error message remains… together the flickering with window maximised. following the suggestion from freeGLUT, I maximised by hand (that is, dragging the lower right corner instead of clicking the maximise button) and an interesting thing happens:

the manually-maximised windows flickers from a moment, then self resize to the maximum size possible without flickering !! is the maximum, if I resize it, even by few pixels, same happens: a very brief flicker, then resize to its maximum.

dunno if came from your code, Wine (as in the alcoholic beverage from grape vine fruit, not the branches of the grape vine…) gdi or freeglut, but is clear to me that indeed the error message perhaps IS a solid lead:

0024:err:gdi:CreateDCW no driver found for L":0"
freeglut (Z:\home\pigi\dload\uadvent3v\UADVENT3v.exe): fghInitialize: CreateDC f
ailed, Screen size info may be incorrect
This is quite likely caused by a bad '-display' parameter

So I suspect that the issue isn’t much in the font used, but involves this -display parameter.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

ps. ROTFL for x gun and the resulting reference to Rambo and the obvious difference between male vs. female breast… now let’s look around for bullets, preferably of the AP variety…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Thank you so much for that information and for taking the time to test. Not sure why I was calling it “VINE” when I knew better. Perhaps I’m getting old. Anyway, I have some learning to do if I want to support this project on platforms besides Windows.

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