• gregorum
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    10 months ago

    pfft— 16-bit @ 3Hz and 128k of ram?

    give me Adventure! waiting for each turn to process and refresh would actually give a sense of suspense!

    edit: for reference, Pong on an Atari 2600 ran at 8-bit @ 1.19 MHz w/128b of ram. so 3Hz is barely enough power to process rudimentary logic and text display. Adventure was node-based with a simple language-prompt interpreter. it would be slooooow, but it would have a chance of actually working.

    edit 2: Adventure, (aka ADVENT) was the original text-adventure game:

    This is one that you can really get your teeth into. You travel around an imaginary world, collecting treasure and solving puzzles, all the while making a map on paper so that you have an idea where you are. The control system is fairly simple with just one or two word commands, and once you get the hang of this, it works really well. It is also made easier by certain short-cuts such as just typing, ‘building’ to enter the building.

    The game ADVENT, which adventure is based on, was written on a PDP-10 in FORTRAN by Will Crowther in 1976 and is considered to be the first adventure game. The following year Don Woods expanded the game by adding fantasy elements and making it more puzzle-orientated.

    Originally written by James Gillogly in 1977 as a port of the classic FORTRAN game ADVENT written by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

    (source)

    I actually got to play the original version when I was a student at RIT in the 90s, as the College of Computer Science still had a DEC PDP-10 running a VMS/VAX system that had a copy of Adventure. It was infuriating, and I wasted far too many hours in study hall playing that shit when I should have been learning C++.

      • gregorum
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        10 months ago

        oh, shit, fixed!

        yeah, if extended memory was required, it could be on the cartridge. some Nintendo and Neo-Geo cartridges did this, too.