Certain Adventurous Complications
Oct. 12th, 2022 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn experimenting with “getting recent text adventures running on ‘8-bit computers,’” I found the resolve to at least try something other than programming exercises. One game using “PunyInform” caught my eye just for offering its source code as well. However, when I tried out a fresh-made Color Computer 3 disk image in the XRoar emulator, which had added support for that advanced model not that long ago, I found myself facing something I might only have noticed during spot-checks of the hacked Infocom game interpreter before. The text displayed as yellow characters on a green background; it was pretty hard to read.
“Actual hardware; that’s the ticket!” came to my mind. Color Computer 3 emulation does seem an inexact science; the GIF viewer I’d played around with in previous months has various unique peculiarities in two of the three different emulators for that computer I’ve got running. I suppose that has something to do with “relative popularity then and now.”
It had been a while since I’d last set up the Color Computer 3 I keep in my basement, only part of which had to do with it also having been a while since I had the desk space to be able to do that (which is a complicated story itself). Once I had the computer, its monitor, and my new disk image reader cartridge all plugged in, though, I got the game booted (it takes a special step to do that). At that point, however, I was looking at yellow characters on a green background again. On a CRT monitor, it was that much harder to read than in emulation.
The one thing I had available to consider was that this had happened after I’d switched the computer to its “RGB palette”; there’d been times when I’d left it in its startup “composite palette” and had red text on a green background, which was only somewhat easier to read but did get me thinking of what machine colours the adventure game interpreter was actually calling on. I went into the Color Computer 3 BASIC manual to look up the palette switch command, typed PALETTE 1,0 and pressed enter (and noticed the familiar blinking cursor no longer blinked in quite the same way), and started the game. Now, I had the more familiar and readable black text on a green background.
So far as actually playing the game went, I was able to puzzle out some problems as I drew a map on paper, but I wound up hitting the wall on other puzzles and resorting to looking at the source code. By that point, I wasn’t using the Color Computer 3 any more and letting it mull over each command (the cartridge leaves out the grinding disk drive I remember from bygone days of making heavy use of computer magazine hints for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), moving on to my speedier current machine. I was a bit conscious of not having been supple enough to examine the last bits of description, consider something really could be picked up and carried at least in the game, and think a bit more about descriptions. I’d also got to the point of wondering about certain proofreading errors and the whole issue of “should the player have to guess what the game writer was thinking, or can the game writer imagine everything any player might try, and work in responses that at least hint towards their unique solutions?” It was more actual text adventuring in unfamiliar terrain than I’d done for quite a while, though.
“Actual hardware; that’s the ticket!” came to my mind. Color Computer 3 emulation does seem an inexact science; the GIF viewer I’d played around with in previous months has various unique peculiarities in two of the three different emulators for that computer I’ve got running. I suppose that has something to do with “relative popularity then and now.”
It had been a while since I’d last set up the Color Computer 3 I keep in my basement, only part of which had to do with it also having been a while since I had the desk space to be able to do that (which is a complicated story itself). Once I had the computer, its monitor, and my new disk image reader cartridge all plugged in, though, I got the game booted (it takes a special step to do that). At that point, however, I was looking at yellow characters on a green background again. On a CRT monitor, it was that much harder to read than in emulation.
The one thing I had available to consider was that this had happened after I’d switched the computer to its “RGB palette”; there’d been times when I’d left it in its startup “composite palette” and had red text on a green background, which was only somewhat easier to read but did get me thinking of what machine colours the adventure game interpreter was actually calling on. I went into the Color Computer 3 BASIC manual to look up the palette switch command, typed PALETTE 1,0 and pressed enter (and noticed the familiar blinking cursor no longer blinked in quite the same way), and started the game. Now, I had the more familiar and readable black text on a green background.
So far as actually playing the game went, I was able to puzzle out some problems as I drew a map on paper, but I wound up hitting the wall on other puzzles and resorting to looking at the source code. By that point, I wasn’t using the Color Computer 3 any more and letting it mull over each command (the cartridge leaves out the grinding disk drive I remember from bygone days of making heavy use of computer magazine hints for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”), moving on to my speedier current machine. I was a bit conscious of not having been supple enough to examine the last bits of description, consider something really could be picked up and carried at least in the game, and think a bit more about descriptions. I’d also got to the point of wondering about certain proofreading errors and the whole issue of “should the player have to guess what the game writer was thinking, or can the game writer imagine everything any player might try, and work in responses that at least hint towards their unique solutions?” It was more actual text adventuring in unfamiliar terrain than I’d done for quite a while, though.