[HN Gopher] The Troll Hole Adventure
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The Troll Hole Adventure
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 25 points
Date : 2025-04-07 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bluerenga.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (bluerenga.blog)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Trinity (I'd call them 2nd generation home computers with a
| screen and keyboard as opposed to 1st gen like the Altair that
| had a front panel and/or attached to a terminal) were easy to
| beat in terms of cost by third generation computers (TRS-80 Color
| Computer, VIC-20, Atari 400, ...) were based on ASIC for glue
| instead of the discrete logic used in the 2nd gen.
|
| Modern attempts to build retrocomputers run into trouble being
| authentic because production runs are too small to justify an
| ASIC so they wind up using an FPGA or ESP32 for a display
| controller.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| "You got to pay the troll toll if you want to get into this boy's
| hole!"
| dughnut wrote:
| I read that headline in Danny DeVito's voice. Always Sunny does
| musicals better than Broadway.
| notfed wrote:
| It's really hard not to devolve into a giggling teenager with
| this headline and how perfectly it conjures up what is perhaps
| the most memorable Sunny in Philadelphia episode ever made.
| phkahler wrote:
| I still have the Troll Hole Adventure on tape, along with the
| Interact that I learned programming on (MS basic! and machine
| code - we didn't have an assembler).
|
| As I recall, you don't flick the lighter you "flick bic" as was
| the marketing slogan at the time. The response would rhyme "flick
| bic" lead to "lamps lit". Other exciting things were using the
| paper tube from the bathroom and the lenses from somewhere else
| to "make telescope" which allowed you to read a distant sign or
| billboard.... Fun times.
|
| Oh right, there's a shovel and if you "dig frog" the response was
| "I can dig it" because you know... the 1970's...
| jbd41 wrote:
| The "I can dig it" happens if you do DIG on any object other
| than I think the dirt. Just DIG alone is what tests digging in
| a room (except it only works in the starting room to find
| anything).
|
| Do you have any good pictures of the tape? There's a Youtube
| video of someone playing it on hardware so you can see the tape
| inside of the machine, but no clear pictures of the real tape.
|
| (Also, hello, I wrote the post! There's a part 2 where I finish
| the game, and I'll be doing the other Interact adventure game,
| Mysterious Mansion, in about a week.)
| mrandish wrote:
| I have a rather sizable collection of 1980s home computers with
| over a hundred different models (virtually all of the Ataris,
| Amigas, Apples, Commodores, Radio Shacks, Sinclairs, Amstrads,
| Dragons, MSX machines, etc). I started collecting them in the
| early 90s when most were less than $5 at thrift stores and I'd
| stopped collecting by the year 2000 because I basically had them
| all.
|
| Collecting back when they were considered basically worthless
| junk by most people meant I paid no more than $30 for any one
| machine and most were actually given to me for free or shipping
| cost. I do have an Interact but it's one of the few I've never
| booted up as I never had one back in the day and being so obscure
| it wasn't one of the computers I lusted after but couldn't afford
| in the 80s. This article has inspired me to dig it out and fire
| it up. I heard from someone a few years back that apparently
| Interacts are quite valuable now due to their rarity (not that
| I'm in the market to sell any of mine).
| qingcharles wrote:
| Fascinating to see there are still video games out there with no
| prior noted solutions or playthroughs.
|
| I would have probably got frustrated and started decompiling it
| to find all the verbs and nouns :/
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(page generated 2025-04-07 23:00 UTC)