Expanding the range of QL Adventures
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 4:23 pm
With many early adventures released using a few different 'engines' and I was wondering whether there might be interest in getting together to create some interpreters to run the datafiles for these adventures on the QL.
I know there is the excellent infocom routines (including the ZIP interpreter) on the Sinclair QL Homepage - http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/index.html
This can be used to run Infocom based adventures, such as the ones famously written by Scott Adams for Adventure International.
Another common file format was the A-code used by Level-9. There are interepreters complete with source available from http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc ... evel9.html and perhaps the Amiga version could be converted to run on the QL.
There is also the wealth of adventures written using Quill (or later the Illustrator or PAWS) for the Spectrum and other computers.
There is already a version of Quill for the QL, which, is still sadly protected by copyright, but you could probably adopt the "Adventure Utiltiies" written by Alan Pemberton for extracting Quill data files and converting them to SuperBASIC for compiling with Turbo or Q-Liberator (in the same manner as his fantastic Voyage of the Beano game). Whilst finding the offset of the Quill data within (say) a ZX Spectrum TAP file might seem an arduous task, I have seen a few Windows utilties (32-bit only) which offer to extract the data from a Spectrum .SNA or .Z80 snapshot (UnQuill and UnPAWS).
Alas I only have 64 bit windows which refuses to run these 32 bit programs, so cannot say if they work under Windows 10.
The main issue is how to deal with the various graphics formats used - but I guess the graphics could be possibly disabled for starters so that at least the text aspect was working fully.
Dilwyn - I wonder if the adventures section of the QL Homepage needs to be split off from the general games section?
I know there is the excellent infocom routines (including the ZIP interpreter) on the Sinclair QL Homepage - http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/index.html
This can be used to run Infocom based adventures, such as the ones famously written by Scott Adams for Adventure International.
Another common file format was the A-code used by Level-9. There are interepreters complete with source available from http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc ... evel9.html and perhaps the Amiga version could be converted to run on the QL.
There is also the wealth of adventures written using Quill (or later the Illustrator or PAWS) for the Spectrum and other computers.
There is already a version of Quill for the QL, which, is still sadly protected by copyright, but you could probably adopt the "Adventure Utiltiies" written by Alan Pemberton for extracting Quill data files and converting them to SuperBASIC for compiling with Turbo or Q-Liberator (in the same manner as his fantastic Voyage of the Beano game). Whilst finding the offset of the Quill data within (say) a ZX Spectrum TAP file might seem an arduous task, I have seen a few Windows utilties (32-bit only) which offer to extract the data from a Spectrum .SNA or .Z80 snapshot (UnQuill and UnPAWS).
Alas I only have 64 bit windows which refuses to run these 32 bit programs, so cannot say if they work under Windows 10.
The main issue is how to deal with the various graphics formats used - but I guess the graphics could be possibly disabled for starters so that at least the text aspect was working fully.
Dilwyn - I wonder if the adventures section of the QL Homepage needs to be split off from the general games section?