Text Adventure Game System by Peter J. Meyer for Atari 8-bit. Disk Image Available on GitHub.

[peteym5]

https://github.com/PJM-NCC-70511/Text-Adventure-Game-System-Atari-FastBasic

This is my next Fast Basic Sample that is my text adventure game system with two programs, an editor and a player. The program has been ported back to the Atari 8-bit and compiled with Fast Basic. It was originally written in BasicXE, ported to IBM-PC MS DOS. I lost the BasicXE Sources many years ago, but had the QBasic Source that is not far from Fast Basic. There were some differences I needed to work around and save memory. Like the string storage of using 256 characters for each string variables. That works against the requirements of this program and consumes the needed memory. Therefore, I wrote a custom memory storage ML routine that transfers text data to fixed memory locations. If I need just to store names, just designate 16 bytes per each character or name. There are opening and closing paragraphs that introduce the game and closes the game. The editor has a string field editor that lets you insert and edit text.. The game data is similar to common databases, where you have text and numeric fields to store all the information. In this case, the data is stored in arrays. You need to go into the editor to set the memory configuration for both the editor and player. You can set the memory Parameters for a 48K, 52K, 64K, or 128K computers. Smaller memory amounts will only let you have less stuff inside the game.
Right now, there  are no plans to get this work on a cartridge. Fast Basic has an 8K limit currently, and the programs compile to 24K each. Bank switching is almost impossible to figure out with compiled program code.
I apoligize for lack of commenting and not using more descriptive variable names. After all, it was originally derived from an Atari 8-bit source code with limited memory available. 

 
 

 

Edited October 24, 2022 by peteym5

[Jinroh]

Very cool Peter! 😄

This should help some authors get their stories on the A8. 🙂

 

Edited November 2, 2022 by Jinroh

[peteym5]

Yes, it is designed to help authors and can be used as a tool for story telling.