Background
Roberta Williams is a country girl whose childhood
revolved around fairy tales, magic and fantasy. She read a lot,
fantasized a lot and told stories to her friends. Some years later,
after getting married and moving to Los Angeles, her husband
introduced her to an entirely new form of story telling – computer
Adventures.
Ken Williams was a programmer on an IBM mainframe
and used to bring a terminal home every night. As it happens, the
computer had some games on it including the classic Crowther and
Woods original Adventure! After playing it at home, Roberta said to
herself "Gee, I could do that!". So she designed an Adventure called
"Mystery House" and Ken did the programming. It was a fairly simple
game inspired by the Agatha Christie novel "Ten Little Indians". It
had black and white line drawings and was only available for the
Apple, but it was a start.
They formed On-Line Systems (which later became
Sierra On-Line) so that they could distribute the game. Before long
they released a second game called "Wizard and the Princess". It had
full screen, high resolution colour graphics and was heralded as a
major breakthrough in Adventures. On-Line's success was now assured.
Over the next couple of years, the number of
Adventures increased with each new release seemingly bigger and
harder than the previous ones. The one exception was "Mission:
Asteroid". This was written as a beginners' Adventure and was
accordingly given the number 0. There are now seven in the series,
but only the even numbered ones are available for the Atari. Who
knows? Maybe the others will one day be translated as well. The full
series is listed below.
#0: Mission: Asteroid
#1: Mystery House (not available for Atari)
#2: Wizard and the Princess
#3: Cranston Manor (not available for Atari)
#4: Ulysses and the Golden Fleece
#5: Time Zone (not available for Atari)
#6: The Dark Crystal
Review
We'll take a look at Mission: Asteroid as it's the
first in the series, but most of the comments are equally applicable
to the whole series. When the game is first booted, the program
checks for unformatted sectors on track 3. This results in the
dreaded graunch ... graunch ... graunch that I've come to hate in
Sierra On-Line's copy protection. I wish they wouldn't do that!
Haven't they ever heard of bad sectors and duplicate sectors and
short sectors and skewed tracks and...
Anyway, you are then asked to flip the disk to side
2 and press RETURN. When you've done so, a triangle appears along
with the message "IF TRIANGLE APPEARS BLUE PRESS THE START KEY. IF
IT IS NOT BLUE PRESS THE OPTION KEY." The triangle on my screen
could best be described as scunge (which definitely isn't blue), so
I pressed the OPTION key. However, I soon realised that I could
press the START key and there was absolutely no difference in the
pictures. I reasoned that the test was necessary because the game
used artifacting. They needed to determine whether the computer had
a CTIA or GTIA chip, then the program could compensate so that the
colours looked right. However, this only applies if you have an NTSC
computer and television (as in the U.S.A). It does not apply to we
PAL users in Australia and the United Kingdom, so you can press
either key and it doesn't make the slightest difference.
The game then commences and you get your first
glimpse of the much acclaimed graphics. What do you think? Terrible
aren't they? Apple owners can't be very fussy! The pictures look
like they've been drawn by a kindergarten child. To make matters
worse, the artifacting mentioned above just doesn't work on PAL
televisions. Instead of the glorious technicolor that we're used to
on the Atari, we get just two colours – black and a horrible yellow
that looks like cat vomit.
The screen layout is just like GRAPHICS 8. Most of
the screen is devoted to a high resolution picture of your
surroundings except for the four lines of text at the bottom. Each
time a new picture is drawn, the bell rings from the console
speaker. (This also happens with Wizard and the Princess and Ulysses
and the Golden Fleece, but The Dark Crystal uses the TV speaker.) If
there are more than four lines of text, then the first four lines
will be printed and you have to press RETURN to continue with the
next four lines. This prevents the text from scrolling under the
picture before you get a chance to read it. Unfortunately, no matter
how hard you try, you nearly always forget to press RETURN before
starting to enter your next command. As a result, you are punished
with another repulsive bell, but this time it's three times as long
as before. In a short period of time, I got rather annoyed with this
to say the least. A reviewer in another magazine was ready to throw
a brick through the TV before his family dragged him off screaming.
Another resorted to pulling his computer apart and disconnecting the
console speaker!
If you're thinking that there must be a less drastic
fix, then you're right. Use a paper punch to cut a write protect
notch in side A of your Adventure disk and run the program at the
end of this column. Hey presto! No more bells! Note that this will
void any warranty you may have on your disk, so make sure you are
very careful not to make any mistakes. The program has all the
instructions you need and is written in such a way that there is no
way it will alter your disk unless it is identical to mine. (Try it
on any of your other disks if you don't believe me.) If you follow
the instructions, you can't go wrong.
At this point, I must give credit to a friend named
Peter Bamford. He was the one who originally thought of the fix and
passed it on to me. I merely repeated the procedure and wrote the
utility to allow any mug to fix his own disks.
Peter began by searching the disk for the bell
character, i.e. $FD. Unfortunately, it appeared about a million
times. Not only did it appear as data or part of an address, but it
also turned out to be a 6502 opcode. Obviously, the search would
have to be narrowed down. (Incidentally, don't bother checking track
3, because it is unformatted and will cause your drive to have a
seizure.)
He then searched for the sequence $1F, $DO. This is
the hardware register CONSOL in LSB, MSB format. Most readers would
be familiar with reading this register to see whether a console key
is being pressed. It can also be written to to control the movement
of the cone in the console speaker. If a sequence such as $8D, $1F,
$DO (or STA $DO1F in assembly language) was found, he'd be in luck
Unfortunately, no such luck. This was becoming a real Adventure in
itself.
He then took a look through the Operating System
source listing for a clue and accidentally stumbled across the label
BELL in the cross reference map. It turned out to be a subroutine in
the display handler that rings the bell. This is where I became
involved. The obvious next step was to search the disk for the
sequence $20, $0A, $F9 which translates to JSR BELL (or JSR $F90A)
in assembly language. This sequence occurred five times. Aha,
jackpot! The first occurrence was found at sector $02 byte $31 in
Mission: Asteroid and Wizard and the Princess and sector $05 byte
$32 in Ulysses and the Golden Fleece. It was used to ring the bell
to let you know that you had to turn the disk to side B. I decided
to leave this intact.
The second occurrence was at sector $F2 byte $71 in
Asteroid and Wizard and sector $E8 byte $71 in Ulysses. This sounded
the bell after each picture was drawn. I replaced this with $EA,
$EA, $EA which translates to three NOPs in assembly language.
The third, fourth and fifth occurrences were
immediately after one another at sector $F3 byte $02 in Asteroid and
Wizard and sector $E9 byte $02 in Ulysses. This was the triple
length bell that occurs if you forget to press the RETURN key when
there is more text to print. I again replaced these with NOPs.
Each disk was modified and tested. The results?
Silence. Beautiful silence!
Incidentally, the JSR BELL is an illegal entry
point. If the programmers have done it once, then they have probably
done it several times. This implies that the Sierra On-Line
Adventures may not run on revised Operating Systems such as Revision
B, but this shouldn't affect us as Revision B was never issued in a
PAL version. XL users will probably need the XL translator disk. If
in doubt, try to check that the programs run okay on a system
similar to your own before you buy them. I don't think you'll have
any trouble, but it's better safe than sorry.
Up until this point, my comments have been very
negative. This is not to say that the game is no good. On the
contrary. As far as Adventures go, Mission: Asteroid is very good!
The aim of the game is to blow up a huge asteroid before it collides
with the earth. The game commences at 12:00 noon and the asteroid is
estimated to hit the earth at 7:15 P.M. This gives you 7 hours 15
minutes of game time to complete your mission. Each move takes 5
minutes, so you effectively have 87 moves to solve the game. The
puzzles are fairly simple and logical, making it ideal for
beginners. It is the time element that's the real killer.
Mission: Asteroid also has one of the most
intriguing mazes that I've ever encountered. Although the game gives
you a route through the middle of it, it is not the most efficient,
so you should try mapping the maze to find a better way. It's quite
a challenge, but I'd say very few people have bothered. Even the two
books of Adventure solutions mentioned below have conveniently left
it out!
Hints
There are no hints this issue because none of the
problems seemed hard enough to warrant them (and I couldn't think of
anything particularly clever anyway). It's just a matter of working
out what to do, then doing it in the shortest possible time. If you
get really desperate, a complete solution can be found in "A
Shortcut Through Adventureland" by Jack Cassidy, Pete Katz, Richard
Owen Lynn and Sergio Waisman (Datamost) and "The Book of Adventure
Games" by Kim Schuette (Arrays,Inc.).
