Dear friends,
I would like to share with you the latest porting, or rather adaptation, for Apple-1 of a classic game for Apple ][ but not only: The Oregon Trail.
For those not familiar with it: it's an educational game (purely text-based, at least in the early versions) in which you have to lead a family of emigrants from the town of Independence, Missouri to Oregon City.
A very long journey, amidst a thousand difficulties, dangers, inconveniences and just little help.
Given an initial budget, you must initially buy oxen, ammunition, food, clothes, medicines, etc., and then set out on the journey.
It will prove to be full of adverse events and only with a bit of luck -or skill- will you be able to lead your loved ones to their destination through ambushes, disease, bad weather and so on.
There are many versions of this game for many platforms. Given the known HW constraints of the Apple-1, I took one of the older, less sophisticated versions, which needs just 16 kB of RAM.
There was already a porting for INTEGER BASIC, but for its Apple version ][. Apple ][ INTEGER BASIC has some more -and better written- functions than the Apple-1 version (see the ‘for..next’ bug in my last post, and other trifles... like the lack of the power-elevation function).
However, the original source code is very generic and can easily be adapted to any other machine or even BBS. :-)
I have tried to keep as much of the original code as possible, but a few small changes have been made and -if I may say so- a few minor bugs have also been corrected, such as the lack of decreasing ammunition after a hunt gone bad and the check on the computer/player number match during duels.
I also implemented a basic anti-cheat feature in duels/hunts to prevent the player from correcting his ‘shot’ after playing it superfast but wrong (only possible on Apple-1 due to its special handling of the keyboard buffer).
The original wording has also been preserved, e.g. when asked ‘Type “GO” to continue’ simply press ENTER. It was like that in the original version and I kept it.
Same thing for duels/hunting: the instructions refer to ‘typing’ quickly a word that sounds like a shot (‘shot’, ‘bang’, etc.) but actually in this game version you have to type as fast as possible the digit from 0 to 9 that the computer suggests.
The faster you are, the greater the chances of hitting the target. This discrepancy instructions/gameplay was also present in the original porting.
This is the link to my usual repository containing all documentation, references, credits and source code: https://p-l4b.github.io/angela/
The program is just below 16 kB, so it needs a generous RAM expansion to run on Apple-1..
Enjoy, then, and have a good trip on the Oregon Trail! :-)
Claudio - P-LAB
