Game Day

Well then, lets get some classic gaming up in here. 

You saw worm:

What else can we play on this… there’s a classic game called ADVENT, otherwise known as Colossal Cave Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) gave its name to the computer adventure game genre. It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. The Colossal Cave subnetwork has many entrances, one of which is known as Bedquilt. Crowther reproduced portions of the real cave so faithfully that cavers who have played the game can easily navigate through familiar sections in the Bedquilt region on their first visit.

Its the first real text adventure game as it’s claimed that the term ‘Text Adventure” was born of this game. Really it did start the whole genre. If you’ve read Clifford Stoll’s book “Silicon Snake Oil” he devotes basically a whole book about how going outside in a real cave is better than playing ADVENT (he’s the dude who wrote Cuckoo’s Egg). 

Word is that this game is included with the install. So let’s give it a go shall we…

and nothing happens, well not nothing but nothing in my TSO screen anyway.  Let’s just check the master console:

I see this, repeated over and over again until,

my World Trade Organization buffer is 100% filled. And nothing accepts any input. Welp

And we’re back in business. So someone had this same problem on the mailing list and it’s because some chucklefuck thought it would be a good idea to put a system command in SYS1.CMDLIB (or something) with the name ADVENT and then the game also had the name ADVENT so they were conflicting. It also didn’t help that the text for the game wasn’t “mounted”. So to remedy that we enter:

ALLOC FI(CAVES) DA(‘MVS.ADVGAME.CNTL(ADVNTCAV)’) SHR

CALL ‘SYS2.CMDLIB(ADVENT)’

FREE FI(CAVES)

which allocated the DASD (or “mounted”) the files we needed to be able to play the game, then we just run the game from it’s specific location instead of the one in our “path”. 

(except I fucked up and put “adventure” instead of “advent” but I fixed that the next line).

but then I remembered I hate text adventure games (premptive: mlyp)

If anyone is interested in playing go ahead, I just used the YOSPOS account to load ADVENT so if you really need to read about exploring a cave go for it. 

Next Time: