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Monster Combat (v0.99)

PostPosted: June 8th, 2015, 2:43 am
by gmh
Hi all,

After a massive typing fest (14K) and a heap of debugging, I'm happy to make Monster Combat (David Ahl's Big Computer Games) available to the community. Monster Combat is a turn based RPG written by Lee Chapel in 1980, it originally appeared in Creative Computing in February 1981. Due to errors in the book, I've made a few changes to the original. There were also some game-play bugs in the original, I've addressed these. I've also added some features which weren't in the original, but make the game more interesting to play, for example you cannot stay at an inn without treasure.

The attached file is an ASCII dump of the BASIC source code. I've kept the line numbers as close to the original as possible, so while the numbering may look a little messy this is intentional. I've only tested Monster Combat on BASIC-80, under CP/M 2.2, if it works for you on some other BASIC be sure to comment.

PLEASE NOTE: I've found a serious bug in the original game that causes treasure not to drop when you enter an Enchanted Castle. I've made changes to the source to fix this issue, and have uploaded my "patched" version.

To get you started, here are scans from the book (http://www.atariarchives.org/bigcompute ... hp?page=34);

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I own quite a few classic BASIC books from the 70's and 80's, and will post more games as time goes on.

Latest update: v0.99 - game works without issue

Re: GAME: Monster Combat

PostPosted: June 11th, 2015, 12:59 am
by gio74
wow thank you for the work.
I'll upload the game today into my Altair :)

Re: GAME: Monster Combat

PostPosted: June 11th, 2015, 3:57 am
by gmh
gio74 wrote:thank you for the work


Cheers, I hope you enjoy the game. It was a lot of fun typing it in, debugging, finding the issues and fixing them. Although to be honest I was pretty shattered the first time I actually found a castle and the game didn't work as expected. Debugging the castle code to find it calling a subroutine that was nothing other than 2790 REM was interesting to say the least. Obviously I have no idea how the original devs expected this to run, but hopefully after reading the description in the book as to how the castles are meant to work I've done something similar to what they expected. It's weird that the code printed in the book was completely broken (untested?), but this isn't the 1st time I've seen this issue in old school BASIC games books.

Moving forward I'll address the 2 game-play issues I list above, and upload a final version. It's quite possible that these aren't bugs at all, and the devs wanted it to play this way, but personally I think the game would be more fun if you couldn't walk through walls or get help at an inn without treasure.

Re: GAME: Monster Combat (v0.9)

PostPosted: June 11th, 2015, 6:54 am
by toml_12953
Do you remember a publishing company called Tab Books? They had many books of BASIC programs back in the '70s and '80s. More of their programs had errors than not! They used a weird typesetting font rather than include actual listings and the transcription errors were numerous. This is not to mention the fact that a lot of the programs had actual programming errors. It was really challenging to get their programs to run.

Tom L

Re: GAME: Monster Combat (v0.9)

PostPosted: June 17th, 2015, 5:08 pm
by gmh
I've been studying the code for this game and I don't think I can implement the check for walking through walls without slowing the game down to the point of being unplayable. So I'll leave this on the back burner for now. However I have managed to patch resting at an inn without treasure with minimal tweaking. I'm at work at the moment though, so the upload will have to wait until I get home. I guess I'll make this latest version v0.99 and if I ever get round to fixing the walking through walls bug I'll call it v1.0.

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Re: GAME: Monster Combat (v0.9)

PostPosted: June 18th, 2015, 4:11 am
by gmh
toml_12953 wrote:Do you remember a publishing company called Tab Books? They had many books of BASIC programs back in the '70s and '80s. More of their programs had errors than not!


Sounds familiar, but it's all part of the fun. Just like trying to work out what was printed in a blurry magazine listing back in the day. GREAT TIMES!

Re: UPDATED: Monster Combat aka Giant Monster Attack (v0.99)

PostPosted: June 23rd, 2015, 8:00 am
by harnas
Wow, I just wrote a comment at the "ROBOT for VT-100" thread. And now I saw this. You guys rock, love this kind of games ;)

Re: UPDATED: Monster Combat aka Giant Monster Attack (v0.99)

PostPosted: June 24th, 2015, 5:07 am
by gmh
harnas wrote:Wow, I just wrote a comment at the "ROBOT for VT-100" thread. And now I saw this. You guys rock, love this kind of games ;)

Thanks for the kind words, I hope you enjoy the game. I'm about ready to start on my next project, currently tossing up between getting a text adventure or another RPG up and running.