Yes, I'm a distant relative to Weird Ed in Maniac Mansion.

Thanks go to Floyd for providing web space!

The web site was last updated 8/7/2007.

My baby: Totally Awesome Dungeon Adventure -­ TADA for short

This is an archive of my Commodore 64 game project, started some time in early 1994. It is a port of "The Land of Spur" by Greg W. Davis -- later updated by Skip "Trajan" Thompson -- from the Apple // bulletin board system "Dura-Europos," running GBBS Pro.

The archive was last updated 7/11/2007.
(Dates are in month/day/year format).

TADA-7-11-2007.zip (4.32 MB)

(Yes, this is a big archive. There's a lot of stuff in it, some of which is redundant, repeated and redundant. If you should find anything which matches this description, let me know as I probably just go right past it without thinkiing 'cause I'm so brain-dead er, close to the project - yeah, that's it, that's the ticket.) \o/

Previous updates: 6/26/2007, 6/1/2007, 4/15/2007, 2/11/2007, 1/24/2007, 10/23/2006, 7/24/2006.

Detailed instructions on how to run the game (which is very much alpha status) will be provided soon when I get around to it. I've added a file, "latest-files.txt", to describe which programs are runnable.

For now:

  • Mount the "module-work.disk.d81" 1581 disk image in an emulator or copy to the "real steel."

  • Run "t.main", which will load the assembly language portion at $C000, then link to "t.startup"
  • Entering "?" at the Cmd? prompt will give you a menu. Most of the one-letter commands listed (including movemement commands) are implemented.
  • I've added the debugging command PRG. This gives you some information about how much memory remains, and pointers to top of strings, etc.

Notes:

  • The game is hard-coded to load in the player named PINACOLADA right now. If you change the character name, the startup process may or may not crash, trying to load the "new player" routine, but at this point in time it is too large for the framework. Obviously in the future this will be more flexible. You can peek at/edit the character stats using "tep79" (the latest on "module-work-disk.d81").

  • Any questions, comments or criticism? Want to help? Please email me at sym (underscore) rsherwood (at) yahoo (dot) com, or join the Yahoo group TLOS_TADA (admittedly, not much traffic, but that's okay).

Other projects on the back burner:

An idea for a front end to Jim Brain's TCPser program. This may or may not be useful. If nothing else, it was practice at uising TrollTech's Linux-based GUI designer. :)

Image BBS (1.2 and 2.0)

  • I would like an archive of every single program I (and others) have for version 1.2a, which I've put in years of work on. A web page with a database of plus files would be cool, but it's beyond my meager web design abilities.

  • Where the heck are the hundreds of former Image BBS sysops hiding these days? C'mon, let's get networked via telnet! :D
  • Eventually I'll start putting more work in on v2.0. I've fixed a few small miscellaneous bugs, and will be able to put lots more into it after I get my hands on the programmer's reference guide. I re-designed the intro screen, and would like to post screenshots (and disk images) as I've gotten it to run in VICE, finally!
  • At some point it might be cool to register the domain imagebbs.net, similar to what CNet for the Amiga has done with cnetbbs.net.
  • Source code to v2.0 was kindly provided by Jack "Rascal" Followay.

Hearsay 1000 speech synthesizer

Scanning in the manual, dumping ROMs, and getting schematics in an attempt to learn more about the device and how to program/use it more efficiently.

  • The speech in the demo (which I shall record for your listening pleasure at some point) sounds great, but normal use sounds monotonous and dull.

  • Voice recognition never worked for me on my C64c. Try as I might, the only results I ever got were horizontal bars on the screen and a total system lockup. I ought to try it out on my C128 to rule out ROM revisions as being a problem.
  • Finding out just how the trained words are stored on disk would be interesting.
  • In my not-so-humble opinion, the demos were crap. Very unpolished and some weren't even finished. The utility programs could probably be improved, too. As that character in the movie The Princess Bride would say: "Inconceivable!"

Star Trek modem-to-modem game

I took one look at a modem battleship game and immediately thought of a Star Trek: The Next Generation game in which two players could play against each other. No real details about this one, except I valiantly tried to program a poor imitation of the Enterprise's LCARS wherein one uses a joystick to maneuver a pointer to "click" on items. I also had the beginnings of some sort of music entry system; I figure I would have allowed players to create background music (not that I had any idea how to let it be played back, not knowing then [and only barely now] about IRQ-controlled players...) during gameplay.

So, that ought to cover the next 25 years of programming projects, huh?

Why do some people use too many commas and others too few? The law of supply and demand, apparently.

-- Pinacolada