Mike Goetz called

The erstwhile Mike Goetz, of B03 Adventure fame, dropped me a line the other day. He's always been a mysterious character because that game included his phone number from 1983 — in case you found a glitch in the game, you could call him and report it. The problem was, like all students, he graduated and moved on from R.I.T. (Rochester Institute of Technology, I think), leaving that phone number fossilized like a bug in amber inside a game people play to this very day.

It's been like watching the inexorable winds of entropy at work. For awhile, even after Goetz headed toward the twinkly Christmas tree of computer lights in Wall Street, that phone would still ring in the dark. No one ever found a bug in the B03 version. But they'd call with Questions. "How do I get the last point?" "I pushed the red button and my computer crashed." "I can't get out of the catacombs!" Etc.

Detritis, decades-old newspaper rolling in the gutters of the mind. The old lady who answered the phone was not amused. She tracked down Goetz' new number and used to pass it out like Halloween candy. On April Fool's Day. Goetz moved again. She got a new number. When you call that number these days, it's been disconnected for dusty centuries.

Goetz' contribution to the game, aside from porting it, was the Computer Room he added on north of Witt's End. Classic. I enjoyed the posters. I enjoyed the klaxons when the alarm went off. I laughed when Rover showed up, AWOL from The Prisoner.

Mike Goetz. Not just a number anymore.

Ephemerae Redux: "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Ephemeral stoned cyclops spotted again!

Adventures in CP/M on Windows XP

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.

1. Download cpm-advent-b03.zip, Mike Goetz' 580-point version from 1983.
   
2. Download the YAZE Windows binary here.
   
3. Install YAZE and start it by running yaze.bat. (There's no other way.)
   
4. Mysterious, ain't it? Screen after screen of helpful information... (*yawn*)
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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).
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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).
   
   
9. 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?

   
   
10. 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.

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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.