
Richard Garriott’s D&D #1 Contest - nkurz
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=39149
======
jholman
Contest terms include:

    
    
        4) Add a “© 1977-2014 Richard Garriott” at the beginning.
        5) May include an addition of “Ported by DEVELOPER NAME”.
        6) Must agree that all rights to this port remain property of Richard Garriott

~~~
null_ptr
Nothing like high-grade lawyer paranoia to sour all the fun for things like
this.

~~~
lnanek2
Since it sounds like they are going to put this game in their real game as a
mini-game, I can understand the strictness here. It would be lame if this was
a free form hackathon, but really it is just a porting contest for producing
an easter egg to put in their real game. It would be pretty strange legally to
have someone else owning a game in their game.

~~~
jholman
It would not be even a tiny bit strange. Games almost always ship full of code
that belongs to other people. Think about middleware (e.g. Bink codecs).

The obvious thing to do is that you're only eligible for the contest if you
grant the contest-holders appropriate (non-exclusive) rights.

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aaronem
Is it just me, or does this game strongly appear to be a roguelike that was
written three years or so prior to Rogue?

Update: Also, I'm no longer familiar with any BASIC dialect, and I've never
been familiar with any that ran on a PDP-11, but am I mistaken in thinking
these two lines

    
    
      00210 FILE #1="DNG1"
      00220 FILE #2="DNG2",#3="DNG3",#4="DNG4",#5="DNG5",#6="DNG6"
    

reference other files, which judging by their names might contain dungeon
definitions required for the game to work?

If so, I have to think this is going to be a short contest with a most
disappointing result.

~~~
CamperBob2
I'm sure they were just ASCII text files or something else whose structure
should be equally obvious from looking at the code.

    
    
        +--------+-------+
        |        |       |
        +----+   |       |
             |   |       .
             .   .       .
             .   .       .
         

... etc.

~~~
aaronem
Very little is obvious from looking at that code. I'm sure nonetheless that
someone can and will deduce the format and produce workable dungeon files, but
whether they have any resemblance to the originals is something only Richard
Garriott, if anyone, can answer, which at best severely complicates the
"faithful recreation" rule of the contest.

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DanBC
There are plenty of people on HN who are good programmers / coders [1] and who
will never have seen BASIC before.

I am really curious to know what they think of this source code. Is it
readable and understandable without access to any kind of BASIC manual? Or are
you making use of as much online documentation as you can to grok it?

~~~
tdicola
BASIC isn't that ancient and should be familiar to anyone who has experience
with C. Scanning the code here I don't think there's a lot of insight to be
gleaned by studying it in depth. There really aren't any comments and program
flow jumps around with GOTO frequently (there are no functions to call) so
it's hard to tell what's going on without studying each line. Variable names
are very short (1 to 2 characters) and don't tell you a lot about what's going
on. If you really want to understand what the code is doing, you're probably
going to need to spend a few hours going through it line by line and
annotating in the margins where each 'function' is and what each variable
means. Once you've done that it's probably best to just rewrite it in C using
functions, etc.

~~~
CamperBob2
I'd be tempted to just write a quick and dirty interpreter for the BASIC
dialect in question. I could almost certainly do that more quickly than I
could port that code to C.

~~~
aaronem
I'm really hoping there's at least one submission which consists of a BBC
BASIC interpreter written in C and compiled via asm.js into Javascript, thus
satisfying the contest's requirements regarding platforms, and which executes
the original BASIC code.

(What I'd _really_ like to see is a PDP-11 emulator written in C and compiled
via asm.js, &c., &c., but I doubt anyone seriously pursuing the contest will
be quite that insane.)

------
deckar01
The source code is a PDF of old printouts... I am having trouble getting OCR
to work.

Anyone know where to find the text?

~~~
daeken
[https://gist.github.com/daeken/11123897](https://gist.github.com/daeken/11123897)
I pulled it out of an OCR'd PDF that someone linked from the forums.

~~~
pipeep
There's a missing newline on line 00590:
[https://gist.github.com/PiPeep/11126853/revisions](https://gist.github.com/PiPeep/11126853/revisions)

