I'm working on improving the game but not rewriting it. It's a fun detox from C# OOP. When it's done I'm gonna see if ChatGPT can port it to.... Everything (CGR voice)
heck yeah. be great to play through this with some added complexity/ twists and turns. i have been replaying infocom stuff recently, so it's right on time for me
@@briangoldberg4439 Yup. Trying to add a bit of depth without really changing the original feel. Will put a ATR disk image on my Github where you can select which version to load (1988, UA-cam Patch, Improved)
he said he typed it in from a magazine, the reason it was written that way was to obsfuscate the strategy from the guy typing it in. plus multiple statements per line made effective use of paper.
@@ssl3546 No I designed it LIKE a type-in from a magazine. With the verb stuff and what not. This would have been inspired by what I saw in Analog Computing and ANTIC back in the day.
In middle school in the mid 90s our computer teacher taught us Basic, and the whole class was awesome because after we learned all the basics we were tasked with creating games. It was great, honestly. We'd show up, do our keyboard exercises, then the rest of the time before the bell we spent on our games. We could ask the teacher Mr Mondragon for help and he'd help when needed, but other than that we were on our own, getting time to play Oregon trail or Carmen San Diego or nibbles and some others if we wanted to for the last 15 minutes of class. He was a good teacher. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back he was probably my favorite.
I made a virtual pinball table that featured all 21 pet chickens i had as a 12 year old kid. It had photos and self made chicken noises. Multiball was 3 of the chickens layin eggs. I was a weird kid
Adventure game logic is the best. *There is a pane of glass in the window* /break glass with crowbar *You can't do that* /break glass with hammer *You can't do that* /break glass with pipe *You can't do that* /break glass with #6 Torx screwdriver bit *The glass shatters*
You are a young man Ben! Enjoy those last two years before you are officially old 😂And suddenly your back starts to hurt. Your knees are aching when you ride your bike - as I found out yesterday when finally the weather was nice for once. 😂
> Ye finds yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS. What wouldst thou deau? > Get ye flask You can't get ye flask!
I love it when I have a project that I'm stuck on, or that I know will take a lot of time, I start drinking, and when I wake up the next morning, it's like elves have magically completed it for me lol..
Great video!! this brought back so many memories of coding back in the day. You could have a whole series on just going through old games like this and I would watch every second of everyone. :)
Now I wanna go find the old code I wrote at the same age trying to make Missile Command on the Coco 2. lolz! Thanks for the drunken debug! Now get us that portable Atari ASAP.
So cool this Ben and great work! When I started this channel it also was basically because I’d found some old x86 assembly code. That I thought people may like.
Love it. It's got perfect adventure game logic. I.e. you have to guess what insane thing to do next with no clues. You have a cheese and mayo sandwich and a door to open. ....
Pretty impressive for 12. I remember at that age i tried to make a "unix" prompt in basic (MSDos Basic to be exact) and this reminds me a lot of my feeble attempt. You got a lot further before i lost interest.
I did two games on my C64 (that I actually finished) I guess I was about 13.. One was a horse racing game (character graphics) with betting... It was fun with friends... then I made a stock market game (I had no clue how stock market actually worked) but it was fun with lots of "news" tickers and other stuff (I do remember graphs and stuff but it was also text based ofc)... I think they are all in an attic in my old house... sadly I fell out with my stepfather so I really can not retrieve them... Even more sad I made a parallel communication cable to connect my C64 and my then later computer Amiga 500 to transfer much from my C64/1541 to my Amiga 500 (not fast, I think I did "C64 transfer" in Basic and Amiga receiving in compiled Pascal and then later stored them on my HD for the Amiga... and then copied everything to my A1200... and now that is all gone... the Amiga A1200 HD drives (had 2) are gone forever... So much creativity sadly gone...
Awesome a song at the end :P Edit: Still watching because code fix is the best part and you're fun to listen to, also I'm almost there and a bit of a completionist :P
So 7 beers is how many it would take me to pull out the tic-tac-toe source I wrote for programming class 20+ years ago? Good to know! 😂 Thanks for sharing!
I might have actually played this back in the day... I remember getting a bunch of disks for my 800XL and being excited because one of them had the name of an NES game I wanted, but then being disappointed because it wasn't the same game. The rainbow title screen also tugs at a recessed memory.
I remember programming something like an adventure on the Atari 800XL, but I never finished it. It had only a few locations , but it had low res Graphics! (I was a few years older and it was much simpler)
I have done something that before, too, more than on one occasion! LOL! Have gone over to an old high school buddies house and dug up old stuff that we did like 30~35 years ago, and finished it while chuggin' down beers like a fish! Best times ever.
Please send one 5.25in floppy, along with $5 plus a self addressed Manila envelope, and wait 3-6 weeks for the update to be mailed. _[edit:_ 🤦♂️ fixed my boneheaded error on floppy size]_
This was an amazing adventure. It reminds me that in 9th grade I wrote tic-tac-toe on a TI-83+ in tiBasic with nothing but the users manual for the caculator while on vacation in Quebec. Times sure were different back then~! Oh the sheer amount of time to dick around I once had. xD
Wow, I wish I had the source for the adventures I wrote for the TRS-80 when I was 12-ish. I remember using lots of arrays for the rooms, directions, items, etc.
I believe there was a type-in game also called "Adventure Island" in either ANTIC or A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine. It seems incredibly likely that a 12-year-old would have the idea of making a game with the same name, premise, and possibly code, but with mods that break it.
A few orders of magnitude more impressive than any of my basic coding from the 80s, much less surviving code from then. The only thing I still have are a couple of 10-15 line programs from my C64 that were menu programs for the single sided single density disks from my 1541. I guess google must have seen my reply on X complaining about the price of Coke a few weeks ago where I randomly replied to Ben, didn't even realize it until he replied back, and then put this in my feed
I am legit 100% addicted to Pepsi and yeah, that is absolutely being price gouged. Especially when beer (same weight, volume, much harder to make) has barely moved.
Aah yes, the ever-popular Strike Anywhere dynamite... *_nice!_* 😅 _(I envision it to be like a safety flare where you strike it on the cap)_ Although, with how sensitive ye-olde dynamite was said to be, you could potentially have just _thrown it_ at the boulder and blown it up! 🥴 _(edit: I know Mythbusters tested this and found it to not be as shock sensitive as purported, but that was modern nitroglycerine, and maybe older stuff with random impurities really was sensitive)_
Why were we still watching? The suspense was killing us. Oh no! He forgot the knife! Go back and get it! He's almost there! Will he be able to insert the rod?! Will it even work? Did he fix it? YES! He gets to go home!
Good job. You should port it to JavaScript/HTML so that we can all play! I wish I still had my cassettes and disks with the (pretty cool) utilities and (mostly crappy) games I wrote way back when.
Man I tell ya, I just received a server circa graduation (2003) literally the computer I wished for back then, dual Xeons, and I'm thinking why do i not have a friend like Ben. he literally lives down the beltline from me. Its a supermicro x5da8, and the only damage i see is corrosion on the ps2 and serial ports. I would have already booted it up if not for a gnawed on wide-scsi ribbon cable. Mice took the power supply, but i would like to hear these 10k rpm hard drives under load. if the mice hadn't eaten it, this cable would be worth $150. And I am looking into how to tickle the control pins on the drives with an arduino, just to hear them operate. Can we do an episode of a TTL to LVD signal converter? :D
I felt severe claustrophobia with your line numbering by ones. 😬 Also cool and terrible you could use a variable for goto. (Don't think you could do that TRS-80 level 2 BASIC which was my domain) Terrible because then renumbering lines to get some breathing room probably breaks everything. Recently I've been reviewing code I wrote as a kid I'd saved to cassette and it's like opening buried treasure. Enjoyed your video. 👍
Yes my line numbering was always really bad in BASIC. As for GOTO VARIABLE, in Atari BASIC that's actually faster than GOTO CONSTANT I can't recall why but it's definitely a thing. Like one of the hacks when handling joystick input is to GOTO STICK(0) rather than making decisions based pulling a var from it.
Way back MAD Magazine had a special computer issue, with type in programs for displaying an image of alfred e. neuman on the screen - I typed it, didn’t work, typed it again, didn’t work … at some point I got it to work, can’t remember how or when - but at least this comment is more boring than Bens video :)
Not that you weren't smart enough as a 12 year old, but it does make more sense that you typed this in from a magazine for the reason you give (not to give too much away for the solution). A lot of times magazines would make critical parts of the game as Data statements or full ASM code to hide those types of things. I do miss those type-in program days (that usually didn't work and then the magazine would publish their errors the following month!)
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE Correct. I had a subscription to ANALOG Computing and a lot of back catalog issues from my uncle. I had studied how they obfuscated solutions in BASIC games because back then the dream of a 12 year old geek was sending in a game to a magazine. So you'd write it in that way, just like how a 12 year old today would make a video trying to be like Mr Beast.
I'm working on improving the game but not rewriting it. It's a fun detox from C# OOP. When it's done I'm gonna see if ChatGPT can port it to.... Everything (CGR voice)
If chatgpt fails, maybe try passing it to a local llm like Phim-codellama from hugging face, see if it does a better job.
I await the Android port. 👍
heck yeah. be great to play through this with some added complexity/ twists and turns. i have been replaying infocom stuff recently, so it's right on time for me
Will we actually see the long-awaited C64 port?! (Kidding!)
@@briangoldberg4439 Yup. Trying to add a bit of depth without really changing the original feel. Will put a ATR disk image on my Github where you can select which version to load (1988, UA-cam Patch, Improved)
Ben, YOU are the entertainment which is never boring, doesn't matter the video subject.
Ben asks, "Why are you even watching this?". Because Ben. I was drinking. You were drinking. LFG
I have this queued so I can listen in the background next time I am drinking heavily while debugging.
It always ends well, of course. Always.
This is an incredibly good game for being made in 1988 when you were twelve and there was no internet to look up how to do shit.
he said he typed it in from a magazine, the reason it was written that way was to obsfuscate the strategy from the guy typing it in. plus multiple statements per line made effective use of paper.
@@ssl3546 No I designed it LIKE a type-in from a magazine. With the verb stuff and what not. This would have been inspired by what I saw in Analog Computing and ANTIC back in the day.
Agree. Seriously good work
And *_me_* at that age would've made WWAAYYY more spelling errors! 😅
In middle school in the mid 90s our computer teacher taught us Basic, and the whole class was awesome because after we learned all the basics we were tasked with creating games. It was great, honestly. We'd show up, do our keyboard exercises, then the rest of the time before the bell we spent on our games. We could ask the teacher Mr Mondragon for help and he'd help when needed, but other than that we were on our own, getting time to play Oregon trail or Carmen San Diego or nibbles and some others if we wanted to for the last 15 minutes of class. He was a good teacher. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back he was probably my favorite.
Not bad at all for a 12 year old in 1988. Programming tutorials were hard to come by in those days.
Not really. I had several books on the subject.
I made a virtual pinball table that featured all 21 pet chickens i had as a 12 year old kid. It had photos and self made chicken noises. Multiball was 3 of the chickens layin eggs. I was a weird kid
The "NOUND" typo is killing me Ben.
Damn, I should've known someone else caught that... Could've saved myself the time! I'll go delete it, to save _Ben_ the time! 😁
Adventure game logic is the best.
*There is a pane of glass in the window*
/break glass with crowbar
*You can't do that*
/break glass with hammer
*You can't do that*
/break glass with pipe
*You can't do that*
/break glass with #6 Torx screwdriver bit
*The glass shatters*
You are a young man Ben! Enjoy those last two years before you are officially old 😂And suddenly your back starts to hurt. Your knees are aching when you ride your bike - as I found out yesterday when finally the weather was nice for once. 😂
I think the payoff was worth watching the video. To go back and fix a mistake from that long ago doesn't happen every day.
7 Beers plus a text adventure is the spirtual successor to the Hitchhikers guide text adventure. No Tea is a feature!
> Ye finds yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
What wouldst thou deau?
> Get ye flask
You can't get ye flask!
Decades later (IIRC 2023), he was indeed able to eventually get ye flask. :)
I love it when I have a project that I'm stuck on, or that I know will take a lot of time, I start drinking, and when I wake up the next morning, it's like elves have magically completed it for me lol..
Ben you're in Wisconsin. You had oh two-tree beers.
At least it now appears bug free. Bethesda still hasn't managed that...
My latest game has sixteen times the detail.
Nicely done Ben, great you hear you rejoice at the end
Great video!! this brought back so many memories of coding back in the day. You could have a whole series on just going through old games like this and I would watch every second of everyone. :)
Merlin, party of one...
LOL that moment you realize that you are 4x older. The morbid chuckle.
I still look pretty good for 48. Strong Irish genes!
Now I wanna go find the old code I wrote at the same age trying to make Missile Command on the Coco 2. lolz! Thanks for the drunken debug! Now get us that portable Atari ASAP.
Ngl, that’s a banger video title and there was no way I wasn’t gonna click! Cheers!
So cool this Ben and great work! When I started this channel it also was basically because I’d found some old x86 assembly code. That I thought people may like.
The best part of getting older is rediscovering your old mistakes and fixing them.
Love it. It's got perfect adventure game logic. I.e. you have to guess what insane thing to do next with no clues. You have a cheese and mayo sandwich and a door to open. ....
i love you even get the snarky voice when critiquing something you created :D
Spoilers Ben! You were supposed to say spoilers at the beginning of this video. 😊
Pretty impressive for 12. I remember at that age i tried to make a "unix" prompt in basic (MSDos Basic to be exact) and this reminds me a lot of my feeble attempt. You got a lot further before i lost interest.
I did two games on my C64 (that I actually finished) I guess I was about 13.. One was a horse racing game (character graphics) with betting... It was fun with friends... then I made a stock market game (I had no clue how stock market actually worked) but it was fun with lots of "news" tickers and other stuff (I do remember graphs and stuff but it was also text based ofc)... I think they are all in an attic in my old house... sadly I fell out with my stepfather so I really can not retrieve them...
Even more sad I made a parallel communication cable to connect my C64 and my then later computer Amiga 500 to transfer much from my C64/1541 to my Amiga 500 (not fast, I think I did "C64 transfer" in Basic and Amiga receiving in compiled Pascal and then later stored them on my HD for the Amiga... and then copied everything to my A1200... and now that is all gone... the Amiga A1200 HD drives (had 2) are gone forever...
So much creativity sadly gone...
Awesome a song at the end :P
Edit: Still watching because code fix is the best part and you're fun to listen to, also I'm almost there and a bit of a completionist :P
Sure Ben, we can pretend that watching you explore and fix an actually complex game you made as a kid is "boring"
Glad to see another video from Uncle Ben.
Entertaining. Bought back a lot of memories.
So 7 beers is how many it would take me to pull out the tic-tac-toe source I wrote for programming class 20+ years ago? Good to know! 😂 Thanks for sharing!
Great video thanks! As someone who enjoys writing text adventures, I found this very intresting.
At least you did something! All I did was drink 7 beers.
I didn't watch it. I listened 😅 But it was fun. Thanks, Ben! ✌️🙂
PS: it remembered me of the games we were coding in qbasic back in the days 🙂
I laughed out loud when you finally got to "ins rod"
Next video: testing conductivity of beer cans and use for aluminum spirals for a crude inductor.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to all of life's problems!
Alcohol is not a solution! Except it is...
I might have actually played this back in the day... I remember getting a bunch of disks for my 800XL and being excited because one of them had the name of an NES game I wanted, but then being disappointed because it wasn't the same game. The rainbow title screen also tugs at a recessed memory.
I remember programming something like an adventure on the Atari 800XL, but I never finished it. It had only a few locations , but it had low res Graphics! (I was a few years older and it was much simpler)
Me: I drank 6 beers tonight and played some video games
Ben: You are like a little baby - watch this
I love stumbling on old stuff, I found my old c++ code for a text game I made when I was 13, it was hand written on paper hehhe
I have done something that before, too, more than on one occasion! LOL! Have gone over to an old high school buddies house and dug up old stuff that we did like 30~35 years ago, and finished it while chuggin' down beers like a fish! Best times ever.
Now you need to release a patch, I’ve been waiting it far too long, goddamit. I’m still glad that developer didn’t dump this game.
Please send one 5.25in floppy, along with $5 plus a self addressed Manila envelope, and wait 3-6 weeks for the update to be mailed.
_[edit:_ 🤦♂️ fixed my boneheaded error on floppy size]_
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE and a case of beer!
@@TheUnofficialMaker I don't think they ever asked to send them *_beer_* back in the day... 😏
But, with inflation, maybe that would track...? 🤔🤣
This was an amazing adventure. It reminds me that in 9th grade I wrote tic-tac-toe on a TI-83+ in tiBasic with nothing but the users manual for the caculator while on vacation in Quebec. Times sure were different back then~! Oh the sheer amount of time to dick around I once had. xD
Wow, I wish I had the source for the adventures I wrote for the TRS-80 when I was 12-ish. I remember using lots of arrays for the rooms, directions, items, etc.
I believe there was a type-in game also called "Adventure Island" in either ANTIC or A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine. It seems incredibly likely that a 12-year-old would have the idea of making a game with the same name, premise, and possibly code, but with mods that break it.
Well done 4 times older version of you!!
I'm watching because I have no choice. I'm currently hanging upside down in my passenger seat replacing a blower motor in my car😅
I've been there before!
A few orders of magnitude more impressive than any of my basic coding from the 80s, much less surviving code from then. The only thing I still have are a couple of 10-15 line programs from my C64 that were menu programs for the single sided single density disks from my 1541.
I guess google must have seen my reply on X complaining about the price of Coke a few weeks ago where I randomly replied to Ben, didn't even realize it until he replied back, and then put this in my feed
I am legit 100% addicted to Pepsi and yeah, that is absolutely being price gouged. Especially when beer (same weight, volume, much harder to make) has barely moved.
The Best title ever !! Great vid Ben
Should be called The Mystery of the Missing Line Numbers
hahaha thats awesome ben! next time you should do a beer count in the corner 😂😂
Video Title of the Year.
Aah yes, the ever-popular Strike Anywhere dynamite... *_nice!_* 😅
_(I envision it to be like a safety flare where you strike it on the cap)_
Although, with how sensitive ye-olde dynamite was said to be, you could potentially have just _thrown it_ at the boulder and blown it up! 🥴
_(edit: I know Mythbusters tested this and found it to not be as shock sensitive as purported, but that was modern nitroglycerine, and maybe older stuff with random impurities really was sensitive)_
Strike Anywhere dynamite 🤣
7 beers Ben? It's time to Polka! :p
I used to write these games when I was 5 or 6 on a BBC Micro. This is much better than mine though!
This wasn't your most boring video.
You're going to release the source, right? I wanna play this on my spectrum...
Lol still here watching 😂
Guess under-ground was 2 words because coal mining was big in the midwest.
Why were we still watching? The suspense was killing us. Oh no! He forgot the knife! Go back and get it! He's almost there! Will he be able to insert the rod?! Will it even work? Did he fix it? YES! He gets to go home!
Ben on a boat. This is all we wanted all along!!
Ahh. Memories of copying basic programs from the back of magazines. The last to publish em was 3-2-1 Contact (PBS Show) iirc.
Good job. You should port it to JavaScript/HTML so that we can all play!
I wish I still had my cassettes and disks with the (pretty cool) utilities and (mostly crappy) games I wrote way back when.
I enjoyed my time writing in basic. This was well worth a sleuthing run
Just here to learn more about writing 8bit video games.
Man I tell ya, I just received a server circa graduation (2003) literally the computer I wished for back then, dual Xeons, and I'm thinking why do i not have a friend like Ben. he literally lives down the beltline from me. Its a supermicro x5da8, and the only damage i see is corrosion on the ps2 and serial ports. I would have already booted it up if not for a gnawed on wide-scsi ribbon cable. Mice took the power supply, but i would like to hear these 10k rpm hard drives under load. if the mice hadn't eaten it, this cable would be worth $150. And I am looking into how to tickle the control pins on the drives with an arduino, just to hear them operate. Can we do an episode of a TTL to LVD signal converter? :D
7:22 Google Assistant: "Okay, playing Down The Hill". 🤦♂ "Hey Google, Stop!"
Reminds me of the adventure games a created on my vic20.
In Rod we Trust.
When is the release date?
I felt severe claustrophobia with your line numbering by ones. 😬
Also cool and terrible you could use a variable for goto. (Don't think you could do that TRS-80 level 2 BASIC which was my domain) Terrible because then renumbering lines to get some breathing room probably breaks everything.
Recently I've been reviewing code I wrote as a kid I'd saved to cassette and it's like opening buried treasure. Enjoyed your video. 👍
Yes my line numbering was always really bad in BASIC. As for GOTO VARIABLE, in Atari BASIC that's actually faster than GOTO CONSTANT I can't recall why but it's definitely a thing. Like one of the hacks when handling joystick input is to GOTO STICK(0) rather than making decisions based pulling a var from it.
@@BenHeckHacks So it BASICally makes a switch statement with cases for joystick directions? Clever way to avoid conditionals.
@@davidmcgill1000I can't recall why, but using any sort of variable for goto instead of literals is a time bonus on Atari.
Release the Crackin'!
😂😅
Nice going.
I feel like a 15 minute phone call would have been more productive. You could still drink the beers, lol.
Still watching.
You reach the beach, the sand glimmers. (But you already knew there would be glimmering sand at the beach)
7/10. Needs more Bud. (Bud the cat of course, not Bud the "beer"!)
Yes, I did know what binary coded decimal was when I was 10!
What about the bug when you're still alive while beeing dead? ;)
Nice video, Ben. 😊
IM GOING TO DO IT ANYWAYS!! LOL
How did you remember all of this ? Lolol
I was screwing around with Google Gemini the other day and it ended up sounding like Eliza eventually.
Did they call you a nerd in 1988? I wish I saved my code from that long ago.
I wonder how many if any techniques or stuff were there and just forgotten about before being introduced more formally.
If you were coding in '88 you were definitely a nerd.
MajorMUD! My first ever
Way back MAD Magazine had a special computer issue, with type in programs for displaying an image of alfred e. neuman on the screen - I typed it, didn’t work, typed it again, didn’t work … at some point I got it to work, can’t remember how or when - but at least this comment is more boring than Bens video :)
Reminds me of the time I wrote Office 1...
You shouldn't go there, the passage is dark, you are most likely to be eaten by a grue.
Hell yeah
27:21 we have shown you time and time again, we will watch just about anything you do.
You mean you drank 1988 beers and fixed a bug in a game you wrote in 7?
Not that you weren't smart enough as a 12 year old, but it does make more sense that you typed this in from a magazine for the reason you give (not to give too much away for the solution). A lot of times magazines would make critical parts of the game as Data statements or full ASM code to hide those types of things. I do miss those type-in program days (that usually didn't work and then the magazine would publish their errors the following month!)
He mentioned in another comment that he made it *_like_* a magazine adventure, but he clarified that he came up with it himself.
Saw that correction in the next issue. LOL
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE Correct. I had a subscription to ANALOG Computing and a lot of back catalog issues from my uncle. I had studied how they obfuscated solutions in BASIC games because back then the dream of a 12 year old geek was sending in a game to a magazine. So you'd write it in that way, just like how a 12 year old today would make a video trying to be like Mr Beast.
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLEMaybe he used a magazine type in as a model for this one? Either way, pretty impressive for a 12 year old kid!
i bet it was Spotted Cow! lol
The most boring video you could make that someone will still watch...+2 months later!
I'm still waiting for the game 🤔
MELT WIZARD
No alcohol problem there...
If drinking beers and finding bugs is cool, consider ME Miles Davis!
Typing always reminds me of Kings Quest 2.
reminds me of high school typing class and the beautiful girl across from me. lol
I drank 10 beers
SO beer does make you smarter...