Recreating My Adventure Game from 1986
In the Beginning....
The year is 1986. I was working at the local council in the I.T. department. I was a Youth Training Scheme (YTS) trainee.
Towards the end of my YTS year, with only a couple of weeks left, my manager had no further work for me so I spent my time working on a computer game.
The game was a top-down adventure. The player moved around a map finding objects and fighting monsters. The game used only text characters to display everything including the landscape. This was a limitation of the platform. An ICL DRS 20 Model 50 computer.
I completed the game in those two weeks and got it running. I stored the game on an 8-inch floppy disc which may now be lost to time and printed out copies of the listing and the map.
And Flash Forward to Today
I came across a dusty A4 folder on my shelf. I had overlooked this for many years. Opening the folder provided a surprise. My Adventure game listing and map printouts.
The ink was fading so I decided to rescue the code and map.
Digitising
Digitising the printouts gave me some technical challenges as the prints were on wide carriage printer paper so simply placing them on a flatbed scanner would be difficult and even more awkward would have been piecing together the scans.
So, I looked for a more modern solution. I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 mobile phone which has a really good camera. I also had the Microsoft Lens app which would allow me to take images and save them to the cloud.
A few minutes later I had them scanned but this was not enough for me. I wanted the actual text in an editable format. So how to convert?
OCR
OCR or Optical Character Recognition would be my savior. Partially that is.
I played around with some free OCR software however results were very poor so I turned to online OCR services. I first had to edit the images and enhance or darken them to make the characters more legible.
After a few minutes, I had text files that, while far from perfect, were reasonably close.
What followed was several hours of checking through the printouts and comparing against the OCR text to finally build a listing in a text file that was 100% accurate to the original and also accurate map Data. Of course, when I say 'several hours' this was actually, due to work family, and other projects spread over several weeks.
So What Next?
So, what should I do with the game? I could leave it to gather digital dust in a corner of my hard drive or I could do something with it.
I really want to do something with it.
I don't have access to the original hardware so I have decided to rewrite the game to run on a modern computer as a faithful recreation. I'm not just satisfied leaving it there though, I also want to enhance the game, improve it and maybe create it on other platforms with graphics.
Target Platforms
Off the top of my head, I want to port the game to the following
- X86/X64 Windows PC using Visual Basic or modern equivalent using Visual Studio Code
- COBOL on X86
- Sinclair ZX81 with classic ZX81 chunky graphics (an opportunity to learn Assembler)
- Recreate in Minecraft using command blocks for the game logic (an opportunity to learn Java)
- Visual Basic for Application (VBA) - It may be fun to recreate the game running in a Microsoft Office app such as Excel or Word.
My first job though is to fully understand the code as I was not very kind to myself. I did not provide any comments in the code.
Watch this Space...
More blog posts to come in the future when I have further thoughts, progress to share, or a finished version of the game.....
