Adventureland is a game created by Scott Adams and released commercially in 1977 for the TRS-80. The game has the distinction of being the first ever game to be released commercially and was the first in a serious of similar games by Adams.
This project a port of Adventureland to the Atari2600. Specifically, it is a port of the MS-DOS version, written in C (file advland2.zip downloadable from the IF Archive)
The advland.bin file must be run on either a Harmony or Melody cartridge or in an emulator capable of emulating the ARM chip found in those cartridge types. Stella is a good emulator for this and Gopher2600 is an alternative.
The game is played with the joystick plugged into the left-player port. Use the joystick to select a letter on the on-screen keyboard and the fire button to type the letter. The currently typed word appears just above the on-screen keyboard.
The above image shows the special characters on the keyboard. From left to right, the characters are space, backspace and return. These mimic the corresponding keys on a normal PC keyboard.
If you have a second joystick plugged into the console then it can be used to quickly move in the cardinal compass directions. ie. Up for GO NORTH, Left for GO WEST, etc.
As far as possible, the original C code has not been changed. Where it has been changed it is only for reasons of accomodating the limitations of the Atari2600. Changes made are documented in the CHANGES.TXT file in the arm/advland directory.
It is likely that some situations will cause the television image to roll briefly. This will depend on the television or emulator settings. The roll is caused by the advland program taking too long for the base 2600 hardware. Without changing more of the C code to accomodate these limitations there is very little that can be done to prevent this.
Scott Adams for the original Adventureland
Morten Lohre for the C port
Font glyphs partly taken from work done by Spiceware and others
Thanks to Bomberman94 of AtariAge for feedback on earlier versions of the game
All files with a licencing header are distributed under the BSD 2-Clause licence. All other files are (as far as I know) in the public domain.