The Colossal Cave Adventure is an adventure game, featuring a maze-like cave with treasure and monsters. The game draws elements from fantasy literature and role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. In Adventure, you will dodge angry dwarves, fight a dragon, and find your way through a maze (or die trying). Puzzles in the game range from easy to quite hard, and you will not get a perfect score in just a single day of playing. The original Colossal Cave Adventure game was written in 1975 through 1977; this game is one of the oldest classic computer games you can play. Guaranteed 100 % free of grues!
The Colossal Cave Adventure is the original interactive fiction game, the first text adventure game, and inspiration for many games published in the 80’s through early 90’s. Will Crowther based the initial cave on the actual Colossal Cave in Kentucky. Don Woods significantly expanded the game. In 2017 Eric S. Raymond began rewriting the awkward original FORTRAN code into something more modern and portable, a project he dubbed Open Adventure; Jason Ninneman, Peje Nilsson, Petr Voropaev, and Aaron Traas subsequently also jointed the project.
Open Adventure CE is a port of Open Adventure to the TI-84 Plus CE. For the French market, of course, the TI-83 Premium CE and Edition Python are also naturally supported.
Adventure is played using textual commands that resemble English. However, the original system Adventure was programmed on has some odd limitations, some of which are present still in this calculator port.
In particular, only the first five characters of word are examined. This
means that you only need to enter the first five characters of any word. For
example, the word "bottle" has six letters in it, so you can abbreviate it to
bottl. Unfortunately, this also means that "northeast" is the same as "north"
so you have to type ne instead to go northeast.
The input parser was the first attempt ever at natural-language parsing in a game and has some known deficiencies. Thus you get anomalies like "eat building" interpreted as a command to move to the building. These should not be reported as bugs; instead, consider them historical curiosities.
Nota bene: You cannot quit the main game just pressing MODE, DEL, or CLEAR. You must type "quit" or "save" to exit. (Alternatively, press ON, then CLEAR).
The standard LoadLib libraries GRAPHX, FILEIOC, and FONTLIBC are required, available at https://github.com/CE-Programming/libraries .
You need the Times and Dr. Sans font packs, also included. Two versions of the Times font pack are included. The Times.8xv font pack contains several font sizes unused by Adventure, so I’ve also included a Times_mini.8xv file, which only contains the font sizes used by Adventure; it saves about 30 K.
Send both ADVENT.8xp and ADVENT_data.8xv to your calculator. The program ADVENT is the game itself, while the appvar AdvenDat is the game’s dungeon data file. While changes to AdvenDat should be rare, different versions of the file are not compatible. If the game complains that the dungeon file is missing, make sure you have the right version of AdvenDat.
You will want to keep the AdvenDat appvar archived. You will otherwise run low on RAM.
The following standard command shortcuts are available:
-
iforinventory. -
gforgetortake. -
lforlook; or alternatively,xforexamine(does the same thing). -
uanddforupanddown, respectively. -
n,e,w, andsfornorth,east,west, andsouth, respectively. -
ne,nw,se,swfor northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Note that because the text parser only looks at the first five letters of each word, those are, in fact, the only way to enter those directions! -
yforyesandnforno. -
zto do nothing for a turn (this may still cause other events to proceed).
While playing, you can press UP to access your command history. Press ENTER to paste the selected command. Press CLEAR to return to editing. DEL is backspace.
To save a game currently in progress, type save.
You will be prompted for a file name to give the save.
If you previously resumed the game, then it will default to using the same name.
If the save file was archived, it will be rearchived for you.
You can resume a game using the Resume option on the main menu.
Simply use the cursor to select a save file, and then press ENTER to resume that game.
You can delete a file directly from the Resume menu using the DEL key.
Archived files on the Resume menu have a dot to the left of their name.
You can archive a save file at the Resume screen using the STAT key.
The standard resume command also still works.
To prevent ruining your battery, Adventure will automatically quit after several minutes of no key presses.
If you resumed a previously saved game, Adventure will automatically overwrite that save before quitting.
If you’re playing a new game, you can manually set the save name using the filename command.
However, if you do not set a save name, then the game will be discarded.
You can quit the game instantly at any time by pressing ON, then CLEAR. Nothing will be saved.
The homepage for Open Adventure CE is https://github.com/drdnar/open-adventure-ce . You can check there for the lastest updates, releases, and to file bug reports.
Eric S. Raymond’s home for this project is at http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure . You can go there for tarball downloads and other resources related to his original PC/POSIX version of this game.
This code is a forward-port of the Crowther/Woods Adventure 2.5 from 1995, last version in the main line of Colossal Cave Adventure development written by the original authors. The authors have given permission and encouragement for Open Adventure; it obsolesces all the 350-point versions and previous 2.x (430-point) ports.
Additional information about the history of the Colossal Cave Adventure and Open Adventure is available at Eric S. Raymond’s site.
This project is called "Open Adventure" because it’s not at all clear how to number Adventure past 2.5 without misleading or causing collisions or both. See Raymond’s history file for discussion. The original 6-character name ADVENT on the PDP-10 has been kept for the retro feel.