COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE MAGIC WORDS HOW TO
COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE MAGIC WORDS FULL
COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE MAGIC WORDS CODE

This will probably entail something parallel to what was done in the BSD Games port – gradually massaging the code into more idiomatic C. Thus, one of my goals moving forward will be to make the logical design of the dungeon simulation easier to understand for a modern reader.

That’s what you had to do then, when a room-filling minicomputer cranked many fewer instructions per second than the controller in your microwave oven.ĭespite all the energy Crowther and Woods had to spend fighting ancient constraints, ADVENT was a tremendous imaginative leap there had been nothing like it before, and no text adventure that followed it would be innovative to quite the same degree. It also looks odd, 40 years after the fact, to see the amount of code complexity devoted to space/time optimization so that (for example) you don’t have to re-parse the text master of the dungeon-defining database on every startup.

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE MAGIC WORDS FULL

(Which, alas, is extremely ugly code full of gotos.) But the FORTRAN Crowther wrote in didn’t have such things game state was all global variables, a “feature” preserved in the mechanically translated C of 2.5. It’s very strange to the modern eye just to see a simulation like ADVENT written with no analogue even of C structures, let alone objects.

COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE MAGIC WORDS HOW TO

The code makes a fascinating study in how to push the limits of the primitive tools then available to him. When Willie Crowther wrote the very first version in 1976 he was also writing firmware for the earliest generation of routers on the operational ARPANET – he was one of the most ingenious and capable programmers of his time. Open Adventure will have a similar option. I’ve actually dealt with this question before, which is why Super Star Trek has both interface improvements and a -t option that invokes the original TTY interface in all its brutal simplicity. We respect our history and the hackers of the past best by carrying on their work and their playfulness. Anyway, I think the answer to the general question is clear if heritage code like this is relevant at all, it’s as a living and functional artifact. Modern version control makes this question easier you can have it both ways, keeping a pristine archival version in the history and improving it. But there’s a very basic question about an artifact like this: should a museum preserve it in a static form as close to the original as possible, or is it more in the right spirit to encourage the folk process to continue improving the code? This is code that fully deserves to be in any museum of the great artifacts of hacker history.

And with it some thoughts about what it means to be respectful of an important historical artifact when it happens to be software.

With the approval of its authors, I bring you Open Adventure. Though there’s a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods’s final version – Adventure 2.5 from 1995 – has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license. Or maybe you’ve just heard stories about it, or vaguely know that “xyzzy” is a magic word, or have heard people say “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”, Long ago, you might have played this game. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation). Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre.

Colossal cave adventure magic words