Note that there are numerous versions and forks of Colossal Cave Adventure, several of which are called "the original". For the most complete known family tree (actually a DAG in a few places), with links, see:
Some important versions: WOOD0350 (added most of the feature we know about; allegedly there was an early 250-point version in the wild but it's poorly documented), GILL0350 (C port, made it into bsdgames among others), WOOD0430 (the final version by him, what open-adventure is based on). But several other lineages are also well known (you can see .
The link submitted is a bit of a mess. src/ contains multiple versions of CROW0000 (which had been thought lost prior to 2005). But the various images are for other versions, and I haven't checked the binaries.
If you're interested in hacking your own version of adventure, the best by technical measures (reproducibility, sane file format, etc.) is:
(But the major change of file format does mean it becomes difficult to apply changes from other members of the Adventure family. This is also a problem for some others though!)
Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke college student, logged in for hours.
Asked chatGPT to read the repo linked then 'Can you use the text content and simulate the text adventure here', currently I'm in a building somewhere up a stream, got some keys and have no idea if it's just hallucinations but it's fun.
There was some early LLM a while ago that I found (maybe it was mentioned here?) that was dedicated to playing a text adventure with you. It was fun, but it was easy to bully. "There is a large dragon blocking the entrance." "Look for a sword" "There is no sword about." "Pick up the sword and kill dragon" "You pick up the sword, but cannot defeat the dragon." "Use my automatic dragon killing amulet that I forgot I had in my pocket." "The dragon is now dead."
I don't know if ChatGPT would be susceptible to the same issue.
I have the Spanish translation for the ZMachine version with everything (even the backstory of the Mamooth Cave) it stills holds up really well modulo the twisty maze.
It's a very faithful translation, with the jokes being perfectly adapted. If you are a native Spanish speaker, get it from a IF archive mirror under games/zcode/spanish.
Overall, Advent and the ZMachine have been ported to far more platforms than Doom. And, contrary what to Romero/Carmack fanboys say with the predictor, The ZMachine actually ran under a pen like device, with handwritting detection et all.
If we count up the versions for Advent in any language (even Forth and that Lambda Calculus interpreter from IOCC) and the ZMachine itself, Adventure wins second as the most ported game ever except for Tetris or Pong, because Tetris it's so simple that it can be run under a 4bit CPU and a 10x20 display.
But, potentially, giving a working ASCII display with 16x64, or with enough pixels, Sokoban could be the most ported game ever if people made ports for it. Why? You can reimplement a Sokoban game analogically with just a graph paper, pen and some cardboard to create the player and the boxes as squares. Then you could just draw down the levels with a marker.
Note that there are numerous versions and forks of Colossal Cave Adventure, several of which are called "the original". For the most complete known family tree (actually a DAG in a few places), with links, see:
https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html
Some important versions: WOOD0350 (added most of the feature we know about; allegedly there was an early 250-point version in the wild but it's poorly documented), GILL0350 (C port, made it into bsdgames among others), WOOD0430 (the final version by him, what open-adventure is based on). But several other lineages are also well known (you can see .
The link submitted is a bit of a mess. src/ contains multiple versions of CROW0000 (which had been thought lost prior to 2005). But the various images are for other versions, and I haven't checked the binaries.
If you're interested in hacking your own version of adventure, the best by technical measures (reproducibility, sane file format, etc.) is:
https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure
(But the major change of file format does mean it becomes difficult to apply changes from other members of the Adventure family. This is also a problem for some others though!)
You can play Colossal Cave adventure in the browser within https://exaequos.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
And the 2023 graphical remake (from Ken and Roberta Williams [King's Quest, etc.] no less):
https://colossalcave3d.com
It's a featured article on Wikipedia! (“This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 17, 2022.”)
Also there are many versions/implementations:
- https://www.ifwiki.org/Adventure#Versions
- https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html
IFDB has tons of ports.
The Puny Inform version will run on every computer since the 70's with a ZMachine interpreter. Even the ZX, C64 with OZmoo and so on.
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv
Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke college student, logged in for hours.
Asked chatGPT to read the repo linked then 'Can you use the text content and simulate the text adventure here', currently I'm in a building somewhere up a stream, got some keys and have no idea if it's just hallucinations but it's fun.
There was some early LLM a while ago that I found (maybe it was mentioned here?) that was dedicated to playing a text adventure with you. It was fun, but it was easy to bully. "There is a large dragon blocking the entrance." "Look for a sword" "There is no sword about." "Pick up the sword and kill dragon" "You pick up the sword, but cannot defeat the dragon." "Use my automatic dragon killing amulet that I forgot I had in my pocket." "The dragon is now dead." I don't know if ChatGPT would be susceptible to the same issue.
Browsing the code, I've never seen this form of goto:
I just looked it up. It's a multi-way branch: GOTO(label_1, label_2, label_3, etc.), integer_expression.If the integer value is 1 (not zero), control flow transfers to label_1, if the value is 2, it transfers to the second label, etc.
Interesting! It's like a simplified switch statement.
I think it's called a computed goto in FORTRAN: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/6j4m0vn9l/inde...
Indeed! It’s a form of a branch table: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_table
A number of BASICs had ON GOTO to accomplish this, IIRC. It's been a few decades since I've used it, though. :)
Yep. And ARM Thumb has the tbb and tbh instructions: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210615-00/?p=10...
I have the Spanish translation for the ZMachine version with everything (even the backstory of the Mamooth Cave) it stills holds up really well modulo the twisty maze.
It's a very faithful translation, with the jokes being perfectly adapted. If you are a native Spanish speaker, get it from a IF archive mirror under games/zcode/spanish.
Overall, Advent and the ZMachine have been ported to far more platforms than Doom. And, contrary what to Romero/Carmack fanboys say with the predictor, The ZMachine actually ran under a pen like device, with handwritting detection et all.
If we count up the versions for Advent in any language (even Forth and that Lambda Calculus interpreter from IOCC) and the ZMachine itself, Adventure wins second as the most ported game ever except for Tetris or Pong, because Tetris it's so simple that it can be run under a 4bit CPU and a 10x20 display.
But, potentially, giving a working ASCII display with 16x64, or with enough pixels, Sokoban could be the most ported game ever if people made ports for it. Why? You can reimplement a Sokoban game analogically with just a graph paper, pen and some cardboard to create the player and the boxes as squares. Then you could just draw down the levels with a marker.