De Tijdmachine by Gerton A Lunter: an English translation for the BBC Micro

Introduction

De Tijdmachine is a Dutch text adventure game based on HG Wells's 1895 novella The Time Machine.

The game was (originally?) written in BASICODE in the 1980s. I've translated the BBC Micro version of the game into English.

>>>> Play the game online <<<<

History

Garry @ CASA very kindly sent me a copy of the Dutch version of the game. It was written in BASICODE which had already been customised for BBC BASIC, so all I had to do was translate the Dutch text into English. The one slight problem was that I don't actually speak any Dutch! But that's where Google Translate came in very handy...

Implementation

The game program consists of only one file (Tijdmachine, De (Gerton A Lunter).bas), in which my English translations are interleaved with the original Dutch text. Since each English line always comes after the Dutch line that it's translating, the entire contents of the file can be copied and pasted into an emulator (such as BeebEm) and the resulting program will run correctly because the English lines will "override" the Dutch ones.