OS/8 Adventure, Version 2.4


This site contains the files for OS/8 Adventure, updated in 2007-2009.
Version 2.0 (2007) update has several features added after the DECUS submission of Adventure.
Data files are dynamically opened at run time (thanks Robert Phelps for the USR.RA routines!)
Text output is now in mixed upper/lower case.
Game save/restore is fully implemented.

Version 2.1 fixes a bug making ADVENT fail on systems with a FPP-12 along with a bug in the text file loading routines. Thanks go to Philipp Hachtmann for help with verifying the fix for these.

Version 2.2 fixes a bug in the USR.RA edits that I added.

Version 2.3 fixes a number of obscure bugs:


Version 2.4 (April 2009) contains a number of tweaks to decrease ADVENT's memory consumption and allows more flexible output formatting.

Update released September 2020 to fix an error with building the initial text file database ("FILE OVERFLOW INIT 0000"). Thanks to Bill Cattey for digging into the cause.

OS/8 Adventure detailed timeline

Working with Bill Cattey, I've reconstructed versions of Adventure back from the initial DECUS 8-889 release to the present. This isn't entirely correct, as it's a best guess from various snapshots of the code, but it gives a pretty good history of the releases starting back in 1979. This is pretty amazing to think that software written more than 40 years ago is still in use today, with bugs STILL being uncovered. Sobering.
The timeline here displays the work that Bill and I did to reconstruct this history and test each of the candidate releases.

Compiled Program

The disk image  advbin.rx contains everything you need to run Adventure on OS/8. This is a SIMH ( http://simh.trailing-edge.com/) format RX01 image.

For a more complete setup, there's a RK05 OS/8 image at advent.rk05 that has source and precompiled binaries, also including a copy of TECO and VTEDIT patched to support VT100/ANSI terminals.

See  ADVENT.DC  for instructions on how to run Adventure. There's a blog posting here that gives directions on how to boot the RK05 image above using SIMH.

Source Code

The two disks  advsrc1.rx and advsrc2.rx are SIMH format RX01 images containing the source code.
In addtion, the file  advent.zip contains the source code in a ZIP file.

The individual source files for Adventure are available below.

FORTRAN source:

ADVENT.FT Main program
BUG.FT Bug report subroutine
GETIN.FT Input reader
INITAD.FT Initialization routine
IO.FT Database I/O
RND.FT Random number generator
RSTRGM.FT Restore saved game
SAVEGM.FT Save game
YES.FT Yes/No response routine

RALF Source:

[Note: Internet Explorer treats these like Real Audio files even though they're marked as plain text. Use right-click/Save As to save them. Better yet, use Firefox.]
A5TOA1.RA Message output
AMAIN.RA Game main routine
BITSET.RA Bit manipulation
CARRY.RA Object handling routines
DROP.RA Object handling routines
DSTROY.RA Object handling routines
GETWRD.RA Array pack/unpack routine, author unknown.
JUGGLE.RA Object handling routines
MOVE.RA Object handling routines
PCT.RA Random message
PSPEAK.RA Property routine
PUT.RA Object handling routines
RSPEAK.RA Property routine
SEED.RA Random number seed/blinky lights
SPEAK.RA Message output
USR.RA File I/O routines
VOCAB.RA Vocabulary

Other Files:

ADVENT.TX Database source
COMPIL.BI Compile batch script
LOAD.BI Load batch script
ADVENT.LD Pre-built load module
ADVENT.DC Documentation
FRTS.SV FORTRAN Run-Time System OS/8 Image

Historical Files:

decus-8-889.zip Original DECUS submission files


This page was last modified on July 5, 2021.
My e-mail address is rick at this domain.
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