I've always enjoyed Mike Goetz' 1983 version of
Adventure, the granddaddy game by Crowther & Woods that started it all. Goetz' version, though, requires a CP/M 2.2 emulator to run on today's computers. Unless you had a Z80-based Kaypro or an Osborne in your life back in the Eighties, you've probably never heard of Goetz' rendition — it's a classic.
On Windows XP, the best of the Z80 emulators seems to be Andreas Gerlich's
YAZE. Daunting at first sight, it's actually pretty easy to set up.
- Download cpm-advent-b03.zip, Mike Goetz' 580-point version from 1983.
- Download the YAZE Windows binary here.
- Install YAZE and start it by running yaze.bat. (There's no other way.)
- Mysterious, ain't it? Screen after screen of helpful information... (*yawn*)
- Unzip your copy of Goetz' game into a folder named adventure (for purposes of illustration). Put it in the YAZE folder. You can put the YAZE folder anywhere.
- Enter these commands at the A> prompt (becomes $> within sys):
sys
umount c
mount c ./adventure
create ADV.DSK
mount e ADV.DSK
go
This gets you out of sys mode and back to CP/M (or ZPM, more likely — same difference).
- The CP/M drive C now contains the Adventure game files:
ADV.COM, ADVI.DAT, ADVI.PTR, ADVT.DAT, ADVT.PTR, DECODE.DAT
Drive C is read-only because of the way it was mounted. You can't save games in progress there.
- Drive E contains nothing. Do this:
pip e:*.* = c:*.*
and all six game files are copied to a writable CP/M disk (which is ADV.DSK as far as Windows is concerned).
- Switch to drive E and start Adventure!
A>E:
E>ADV
Copyright (c) 1983 Michael Goetz
Welcome to the *new* Adventure! Say "NEWS" to get up-to-date game details.
Would you like instructions?
- You may now discard the adventure folder from step 5. It was just a way to copy the game into a mountable, writable YAZE disk file. In this directory, you can save your games in progress! Keep the ADV.DSK file forever — it (now, anyway) contains Goetz' Adventure game — and mount it as needed.
Enjoy this still, small blast from the past.
By the way, if you'd like to edit Andreas'
.yazerc initialization file, be sure to use Linux-style line endings, i.e.,
LF (0x0a) only, not
CR (0x0d) or
CRLF (0x0d 0x0a). Macintosh or MS-DOS line endings won't cut it — lots of file not found errors when you try to start up. If you need a text editor that can do the job under Windows XP, try Scintilla's
SciTE and look under Options → Line End Characters.
Labels: adventure, CP/M, Mike Goetz, YAZE
I'm a sucker for the old Crowther & Woods text adventure games. I run most of the old MS-DOS stuff in Wine (or DOSBox), but one of my favorites ran on my Osborne I and Kaypro 10 luggables, under CP/M 2.2. The trick is, how to get that up and running under Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron"? QED, as you can see! I've even got my ancient ZorkNotes database for this game running — it's a Perl script using SQLite now, but it was written in and for dBase II and ZIP.COM back in the old days.
