[HN Gopher] Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)
___________________________________________________________________
Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)
Author : shakna
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-04-26 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| musicale wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
|
| And the 2023 graphical remake (from Ken and Roberta Williams
| [King's Quest, etc.] no less):
|
| https://colossalcave3d.com
| svat wrote:
| It's a featured article on Wikipedia! ("This article appeared
| on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 17,
| 2022.")
|
| Also there are many versions/implementations:
|
| - https://www.ifwiki.org/Adventure#Versions
|
| - https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html
| anthk wrote:
| IFDB has tons of ports.
|
| The Puny Inform version will run on every computer since the
| 70's with a ZMachine interpreter. Even the ZX, C64 with OZmoo
| and so on.
|
| https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv
| musicale wrote:
| As I understand it 2023 version is not exactly a port but a
| 3D graphical remake. I thought it was interesting for that
| reason and also since it was developed by the founders of
| Sierra, an important company in the history of adventure
| games.
| philiplu wrote:
| Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around
| 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke
| college student, logged in for hours.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Browsing the code, I've never seen this form of goto:
| GOTO(1100,1004,1013,1020,1004,1004)(IKIND+1)
|
| I just looked it up. It's a multi-way branch: GOTO(label_1,
| label_2, label_3, etc.), integer_expression.
|
| If the integer value is 1 ( _not zero_ ), control flow transfers
| to label_1, if the value is 2, it transfers to the second label,
| etc.
|
| Interesting! It's like a simplified switch statement.
| mayank wrote:
| Indeed! It's a form of a branch table:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_table
| beej71 wrote:
| A number of BASICs had ON GOTO to accomplish this, IIRC. It's
| been a few decades since I've used it, though. :)
| kragen wrote:
| Yep. And ARM Thumb has the _tbb_ and _tbh_ instructions: http
| s://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210615-00/?p=10...
| tgv wrote:
| I think it's called a computed goto in FORTRAN:
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/6j4m0vn9l/inde...
| o11c wrote:
| Note that there are _numerous_ versions and forks of Colossal
| Cave Adventure, several of which are called "the original". For
| the most complete known family tree (actually a DAG in a few
| places), with links, see:
|
| https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html
|
| Some important versions: WOOD0350 (added most of the feature we
| know about; allegedly there was an early 250-point version in the
| wild but it's poorly documented), GILL0350 (C port, made it into
| bsdgames among others), WOOD0430 (the final version by him, what
| open-adventure is based on). But several other lineages are also
| well known (you can see .
|
| The link submitted is a bit of a mess. src/ contains multiple
| versions of CROW0000 (which had been thought lost prior to 2005).
| But the various images are for other versions, and I haven't
| checked the binaries.
|
| If you're interested in hacking your own version of adventure,
| the best by technical measures (reproducibility, sane file
| format, etc.) is:
|
| https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure
|
| (But the major change of file format does mean it becomes
| difficult to apply changes from other members of the Adventure
| family. This is also a problem for some others though!)
| anthk wrote:
| I have the Spanish translation for the ZMachine version with
| everything (even the backstory of the Mamooth Cave) it stills
| holds up really well modulo the twisty maze.
|
| It's a very faithful translation, with the jokes being perfectly
| adapted. If you are a native Spanish speaker, get it from a IF
| archive mirror under games/zcode/spanish.
|
| Overall, Advent and the ZMachine have been ported to far more
| platforms than Doom. And, contrary what to Romero/Carmack fanboys
| say with the predictor, The ZMachine _actually_ ran under a pen
| like device, with handwritting detection et all.
|
| If we count up the versions for Advent in any language (even
| Forth and that Lambda Calculus interpreter from IOCC) and the
| ZMachine itself, Adventure wins second as the most ported game
| ever except for Tetris or Pong, because Tetris it's so simple
| that it can be run under a 4bit CPU and a 10x20 display.
|
| But, potentially, giving a working ASCII display with 16x64, or
| with enough pixels, Sokoban could be the most ported game ever if
| people made ports for it. Why? You can reimplement a Sokoban game
| analogically with just a graph paper, pen and some cardboard to
| create the player and the boxes as squares. Then you could just
| draw down the levels with a marker.
| tudorw wrote:
| Asked chatGPT to read the repo linked then 'Can you use the text
| content and simulate the text adventure here', currently I'm in a
| building somewhere up a stream, got some keys and have no idea if
| it's just hallucinations but it's fun.
| technothrasher wrote:
| There was some early LLM a while ago that I found (maybe it was
| mentioned here?) that was dedicated to playing a text adventure
| with you. It was fun, but it was easy to bully. "There is a
| large dragon blocking the entrance." "Look for a sword" "There
| is no sword about." "Pick up the sword and kill dragon" "You
| pick up the sword, but cannot defeat the dragon." "Use my
| automatic dragon killing amulet that I forgot I had in my
| pocket." "The dragon is now dead." I don't know if ChatGPT
| would be susceptible to the same issue.
| terribleperson wrote:
| To be fair, there's not a lot of reason for a text adventure
| LLM to not go along with such behavior. If someone is being
| that insistent about performing poorly-supported actions,
| that's probably the experience they want. A human DM wouldn't
| go along, of course.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Yes, you're absolutely right. I was pushing it on purpose
| to see if there were any guard rails. I didn't really fault
| it for doing what it did, and wasn't even surprised. But it
| did illustrate the difference between it and a human DM, as
| you say, or a programmed text adventure (which can often be
| frustrating in the other, artificially constrained,
| direction). It actually lead to some really bizarre and
| enjoyable stream of consciousness type output when I pushed
| it even farther, and ended up almost trippy.
| baudaux wrote:
| You can play Colossal Cave adventure in the browser within
| https://exaequos.com
| wduquette wrote:
| I had a copy of the Fortran IV source for the PDP-11 back in the
| late 70's. My friend and I tried to extend the game a bit, but
| soon ran into trouble. Dunno whether this is the same code or
| not.
| WillAdams wrote:
| For folks interested in the code see:
|
| http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
|
| (the source re-written as a Literate Program by Dr. Donald Knuth)
|
| Wish I still had the teletype prints of when I played it on an HP
| 3000 minicomputer at a local college --- did finally finish the
| game using a port to Windows.
|
| My wife quite enjoyed _Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women
| Who Made the Internet_ which is one of the references from
| Wikipedia and covers the backstory in great detail.
| pklausler wrote:
| It was a satisfying moment when ADVENTURE first compiled and ran
| correctly with flang-new; really brought me back to my childhood
| when I encountered it on MECC.
| mrandish wrote:
| While exploring the Adventure Family Tree
| (https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html), I came across a
| promising improved variant called ADV770 by Mike Arnautov
| (https://mipmip.org/adv770/index.html).
|
| The extensive FAQ indicates much care, thought, research and
| testing devoted to making modern improvements and expanding the
| game while remaining faithful to the original lineage of the most
| popular mainline versions. Particularly interesting to me were:
| improvements to the parser, extended vocabulary, expanded
| descriptions and some careful pruning of a few minor locales
| which confused many players, never had an apparent purpose and
| were perhaps never completed in original versions. ADV770 is
| playable in browsers and currently supported, with the author
| even offering free individualized, contextual hints via email for
| stuck players.
|
| Having started with a 4K 8-bit microcomputer, I never got to play
| the mainframe-based original and have had it on my list for a
| while. My first experiences with text adventure games were
| cassette tape-based games written in 8-bit assembler by solo
| programmer, garage-based "game publishers" and sold by mail in
| the back of early 80s hobby zines. While those authors were
| clearly inspired by playing the OG Adventure, the limitations of
| CPU, memory and only a few months of part-time development by a
| single programmer clearly showed. The extremely limited
| vocabulary, abbreviated descriptions and simplified parsers were
| frustrating, so I suspect I never got the full experience of the
| larger, more mature mainframe-based games which had benefited
| from iteration by multiple authors and direct feedback from
| hundreds of players in university computer labs. I think ADV770
| sounds like what I'm looking for: a well-curated synthesis of the
| most beloved and iconic versions that remains faithful to the OG
| story and experience but with some of the rough edges fixed.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Other playable-in-browser versions include Eric S. Roberts'
| "Wellesley Adventure"
| https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/Adventure/
|
| and the various versions at http://www.gobberwarts.com/
|
| and https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-26 23:01 UTC)