ColossalCave is my rewrite of a Unix C version of the classic text adventure game by Jerry D. Pohl that was based on a BDS C version by Jay R. Jaegar that was, itself, based on the expanded FORTRAN version by Don Woods that was derived from the original FORTRAN code by Willie Crowther. For more details on the history of this program, see "David Kinder's guide to Adventure downloads at the Interactive Fiction Archive". And, to help set the mood, the text is displayed using my new Teleprinter class that tries to simulate a bit of what it was like to play the game on a vintage, Model 33 Teletype, or a pin-feed, Model 43 teleprinter over a 300, 1200, or 2400 baud modem connection.
The purpose of my rewrite is to make the code more accessible for adaptation and study to those who are more familiar with Java than with FORTRAN as well as to restructure the code in a way that, hopefully, makes it easier to follow the logic of how it works. Where the original code used lots of old school FORTRAN tricks to compact the code and data in order to fit in the limited RAM of early computer systems, I've tried' to unpack many of these array-based structures into an annotated Map class that consolidates much of the information into an array of Room objects and added comments in places where the code prints responses to various actions to help you follow how this logic works. However. much old school coding funkiness still remains, such as using global variables to pass parameters to functions called and using modulo arithmetic to pack two, or more values into a single integer.
Caveat: I tried to be as careful as possible while converting the code from C to Java, but it's easily possible that I may have broken something as part of my rewrite, so please don't rely on my code as a gospel when it comes to how Don Woods' version of Colossal Cave is expected to operate. If you notice some odd behavior, please file an "Issue" in this GitHub archive and I'll try to check into it when I have a chance.
While I have yet to fully test the code (it takes a lot of time to explore the cave and test all the suprises and traps coded into the original game), I have found a fixed some bugs that I believe were in the C code I used as the basis for this Java version. These are:
- Fixed a bug in
initplay()that prevented the player from being able to taking the "spice" treasure. - Fixed a bug in
moveObj()that could index outside thefixedObjLocation[]array - Fixed the
rand()function so it would choose a random seed at startup (as originally coded in C, the save events would always repeat)
Java 8 JDK, or later must be installed in order to compile the code. There is also a Runnable JAR file included in the checked in code that you can download. On a Mac, just double click the ColossalCave.jar file and it should start. You should also be able to run the JAR file on Windows or Linux systems, but you'll need to have a Java 8 JRE, or later installed and follow the appropriate process for each needed to run an executable JAR file.
Wayne