Tale of Ancient Land - new game for CP/M \ VOGONS

Tale of Ancient Land - new game for CP/M

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First post, by dely

Posted on 2025-03-17, 20:09

dely Offline

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Forever Party 2025 featured the launch of my new text adventure game Tale of Ancient Land. It is most likely the first game for CP/M in decades, and is set in the ancient times of pagan Eastern Europe and modelled on the once popular MUD-type pastimes - we take on the role of a traveller who is faced with the task of acquiring four artifacts of power.

The program is multiplatform and is written for CP/M 2.2 (works with CP/M 3 too), so it runs on virtually any 48 KB TPA computer that can run this operating system.

The games was tested on various machines including:

Commodore 128
Amstrad CPC 6128
Elwro 800 Junior
BOSMAN-8
Indus GT (disk drive for Atari 8-bit computers)
Atari 1090XL replica
SVI 738 (MSX)
ZX Spectrum 128+3
FDD 3000 (disk drive for ZX Spectrum / Timex computers)

The sources, as well as ready-made disk images for various systems, can be downloaded from the repo https://gitlab.com/delysio/adventure/

Reply 1 of 7, by bakemono

Posted on 2025-03-18, 16:30

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Turbo Pascal programs never work on my Z280, this confirms it. A new release without 40 years of bitrot also silently returns to the command interpreter...

GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage

Reply 2 of 7, by dely

Posted on 2025-03-18, 18:53

dely Offline

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Can you check on your machine and send the result of the SURVEY.COM application?

https://retrobrewcomputers.org/n8vem-pbwiki-a … 00862/index.htm

Reply 3 of 7, by Robbbert

Posted on 2025-03-19, 11:53

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I don't have any of those computers, so I tried the Amstrad CPC 6128 in an emulator (MAME), but without success.

The issue is that because it's a CP/M program, normally on the CPC you'd enter |CPM and then it should run the program, however it says the disk is unreadable. If I don't do |CPM, then CAT will list the files, but of course it isn't possible to run .COM files in this mode.

I also looked at the msx disk, but MAME doesn't support .IMG files for MSX or the SVI-738.

Reply 4 of 7, by dely

Posted on 2025-03-19, 16:37

dely Offline

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For the |CPM command to have an effect, you must have a system disk with CP/M. For obvious reasons, I should not distribute the game with the operating system, which is copyrighted.

Reply 5 of 7, by bakemono

Posted on 2025-03-19, 18:21

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dely wrote on 2025-03-18, 18:53:

Can you check on your machine and send the result of the SURVEY.COM application?

https://retrobrewcomputers.org/n8vem-pbwiki-a … 00862/index.htm

This program runs, and the memory map looks correct, though it doesn't seem to handle harddisk partitions correctly.

For the |CPM command to have an effect, you must have a system disk with CP/M. For obvious reasons, I should not distribute the game with the operating system, which is copyrighted.

Anyone who would like to obtain CP/M should take note of this statement by the president of DRDOS (owner of Digital Research IP) http://cpm.z80.de/license.html in which permission has been granted to distribute and modify CP/M. OEM copies, customized for specific hardware, might be hard to find and might contain software copyrighted by other entities. CP/M itself though is in the clear.