8

Advent made the rounds of PDP-10 computers in about 1975. I once got ahold of the source code in FORTRAN and recoded it in, of all things, Turbo Pascal, but I never got around to thoroughly debugging it. There were just too many pathways.

Are there any completed or in-progress restorations of the game in existence?

Stephen Kitt
  • 121,835
  • 17
  • 505
  • 462
Walter Mitty
  • 6,128
  • 17
  • 36
  • 1
    well in theory you could translate it to c, which would build on pretty much any platform. I assume it's text only? – acolchagoff Dec 01 '16 at 03:07
  • 4
    I think this question is too open ended and not a good fit for the Stack Exchange model. – JAL Dec 01 '16 at 03:49
  • 5
    Which version are you interested in?. I count ports to *nix, Commodore (PET and 64), MS-DOS and standalone IBM-PC, Apple II, TRS-80, MacOSX, Windows, iPod, Z-machine, javascript, etc. It's probably up there with Pong and Tetris for "widely ported games". – Mark Dec 01 '16 at 04:48
  • Open source ports of Advent are widely available in pretty much any language you care to name. I have one on my phone and one Windows 10 app. Looking at one of these should help you debug your own port. – Chenmunka Dec 01 '16 at 08:50
  • 2
    This question has been flagged as "too broad". Could you narrow it down a little? (I'm not actually sure what the question here is. Are you asking for information about other ports of this game and, if so, could you make that a little more explicit?) – wizzwizz4 Dec 01 '16 at 21:49
  • Yes, it's not a very good question. But it got a very good answer, so I plan to just let it rest. It somebody else wants to improve the question, so be it. – Walter Mitty Dec 03 '16 at 14:55
  • I would assume most of today's retro implemetations use the C implementation (the 430 points version from here: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/) - that's what I used as a base for some implementations on my classic computers – tofro Jul 04 '18 at 14:26

3 Answers3

22

The adventure module on PyPI is a faithful, modern re-implementation of the 1977 PDP-10 FORTRAN version of Adventure (aka the “350-point” version), which goes so far as to re-use the exact same advent.dat file:

This is a faithful port of the “Adventure” game to Python 3 from the original 1977 FORTRAN code by Crowther and Woods (it is driven by the same advent.dat file!) that lets you explore Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again.

It's available anywhere PyPI runs, and is packaged in particular for Debian 9 and later and Ubuntu 16.10 and later.

As Mark pointed out, Adventure is available in many other ports and variants.

Community
  • 1
Stephen Kitt
  • 121,835
  • 17
  • 505
  • 462
  • Thanks very much. I was looking for just this kind of link. If I really get into it, I'll try a port from python to powershell. I'm kinda old for this stuff now, however. – Walter Mitty Dec 01 '16 at 11:06
  • 2
    @WalterMitty: You should probably be aware that the original "save" feature worked by physically saving a copy of the game's address space to disk. To restore your game you just executed the advent.sav file. This is probably not possible on most modern operating systems. – TMN Dec 09 '16 at 16:00
6

The most complete list of Adventure variants I know of is at http://advent.jenandcal.familyds.org/ -- that includes commercial ports as well as open-source versions.

(ETA: Page appears to be offline as of July 2018 - the wayback machine has a recent copy).

john_e
  • 7,263
  • 20
  • 44
4

I have Crowther's original game compiled with the DEC F40 compiler and running on ITS.

The files, advent.f4 and advent.dat, are here:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/games

The build script is here:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/1e4a80b7dee1db11d1ba58e65cb53366a586e087/build/build.tcl#L1067-L1079

Lars Brinkhoff
  • 3,111
  • 16
  • 35