It's good to know that others are doing this. Until Marcos said today, I had no idea there were others interested in trying to port old BASIC programs from other computers.
I have quite a few text adventure games here (well, all types of programs really), salvaged from that old hard drive, and written in various old BASICs. If anyone would like a copy of one or two of them to try to convert to QL BASIC, just let me know! Most (not all) are un-tokenised ASCII listings, plain text files essentially, so would not need an emulator or original computer to decode and transfer to a QL environment. Although it's not often you hear of people taking an interest in text adventures on the QL scene, I suppose that seeing "new" software appear may spur others on to produce more software for the QL. In my case, I always thought that once I retired, I'd have more time to write QL software. Sadly, that didn't quite work out - if anything I seem to be busier than ever since I retired! I've quietly been writing some routines to help with porting and converting such old listings to QL BASIC, just to make life simpler for myself when converting them - I tend to find that "hand-editing" these old BASIC programs tends to produce too many errors which take too long to correct, so any way of part-automating the conversion might reduce the time it takes to produce a QL version. An example of such a program is something I call RENUMQB which takes a source program with or without line numbers and renumbers, including non-computed GOTO and GOSUB statements. Older programs like these are often a spaghetti of randomly numbered GOTOs, so it helps me tidy up the listings by renumbering evenly before you even start converting the BASIC itself, especially if there are line numbers higher than the QL BASIC allows. Once I've tested these little utilities enough I hope to release them as a package to help with converting such old BASIC listings. If anyone would like a copy of RENUMQB to test (accepting that it's an early version so far, probably with bugs), please let me know. For programs which are in tokenised format (i.e. they just look like garbage when you view them to the screen on a QL), there is a Detokeniser program on my website: https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/basic/detokenize.zip Unless it's one of the supported formats, you'll need to compile your own token DATA statements in the program, although it already handles a number of formats like Applesoft, GWBASIC, MBASIC, MSX, Nascom, Pet, TRS80. Sadly, the original author has passed away, so I suppose it's unlikely to get updated any further. Dilwyn On Fri, 12 Sept 2025 at 15:54, Derek via Ql-Users <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi > > I have ported some text adventures: > > ESCAPE FROM S.S.A.D.B > DOGSTAR > > from the Infocom archives, but thought there would be no interest in text > adventures games... > Regards, Derek > > On 12 September 2025 14:02:48 BST, Marcos Cruz via Ql-Users > <[email protected]> wrote: > >Dilwyn Jones via Ql-Users escribió/skribis/wrote/scrit > >(2025-09-10T17:20:11+0100): > > > >> Dracula is a horror text adventure I've ported to the QL. Originally > >> written by Elizabeth Arkush in 1984, it's been ported to SuperBASIC > >> and slightly enhanced. > > > >Thank you, Dilwyn. Good work! > > > >I love to program and to port text adventures. > > > >I have tried it with SMSQmulator and it works great. > > > >I have noted two issues: > > > >- The <BOOT> file loads <DRACULA_bas> and <dracula_scr>, but the files > > in the zip are called <DRACULA.bas> and DRACULA.scr>. > >- Your version is case-insensitive, so you may remove the original > > message "Please type in CAPITALS ONLY." at the start. > > > >By the way, do you know where the original code is published? It is not > >in IF Archive (https://ifarchive.org), IFDB (https://ifdb.org) or even > >Internet Archive (https://archive.org). I have tried also several search > >engines but got no useful result. > > > > > >-- > >Marcos Cruz > >http://programandala.net > >_______________________________________________ > >QL-Users Mailing List > _______________________________________________ > QL-Users Mailing List _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
