More text-based adventures for the TI-eZ80 series
Posted by Xavier on 25 December 2020, 20:48 GMT
With access to native code programs restored almost four months ago, it's high time I resumed featuring programs for the TI-eZ80 series: TI-83 Premium CE / 84 Plus CE and Python variants thereof :)
Let's start with another couple of "text adventures" - text output and formatted text commands input - uploaded in 2019. The popularity of the genre has faded, but well-designed adventures are usually hours of fun, sometimes temporarily frustrating when there's a roadblock, for those who attempt to discover the adventures entirely by themselves, without using walkthroughs. Taking external notes and map drawings is advised in some games, especially to help re-playing them.
Open Adventure CE is a port Colossal Cave Adventure 2.5 by "DrDnar". The programming of the original Colossal Cave Adventure game started in 1975 (!); since then, a significant number of persons have contributed to various versions of it. As in many adventure games, the player is navigating a complex maze containing treasures and monsters, solving puzzles, while of course trying to avoid dying prematurely.
A first upload in our archives for its author, ZEMU by Nicholas Mosier brings Z-Machine emulation to the TI-eZ80 series. The Z-Machine is a lightweight 16-bit virtual machine running Z-Code, created in the late 1970s for executing text adventures on a huge variety of platforms, originally used by Infocom; over time, successive versions of the spec and machine have gained capabilities, and spawned several improved derivatives allowing e.g. native support for 32-bit integers, the making of larger files, or the addition of images and sound data, for more complex and realistic games. The availability of a Z-Machine means that among other games, you can play Zork on your TI-eZ80 calculator, and therefore be eaten by a grue plenty of times before you beat the game... don't worry, that's natural, that's the hallmark of Zork ;)
We wish you a merry Christmas, and a hopefully as good as possible end of the very peculiar year 2020, hoping that 2021 will be a better one...
Article written by Lionel Debroux.
