Play 1978 Oregon Trail in the browser

[empressplay]

https://paleotronic.com/applesoft/?load=/applesoft/examples/adventure/oregon.apl

[pvg]

Oregon Thread yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645822

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Whenever I come across The Oregon Trail, I'm reminded of this awesome article:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/no-son-of-mine-plays-ore...

It unironically completely changed my perspective on the game.

[jasperry]

I was always confused when I saw nostalgia screenshots of Oregon Trail, because they had fancier graphics than the version I remembered. Then I saw this version, which is even older than the one I played. So I searched and found this site with all the versions: https://www.pcgamer.com/every-version-of-the-oregon-trail-ra...

It looks like I played the 1980 version, which at least had a primitive type of graphical hunting.

[Waterluvian → jasperry]

Wow yeah. I somehow assumed my Apple II version was the original. There was a 1975 text based version?!

[chrismiceli]

I attempted to emulate the 1975 version by interpreting the basic as JS. It probably has some issues in the conversion, but it should be more accessible: https://chrismiceli.github.io/TheOregonTrail/

It essentially creates a state machine for each line of Basic, and uses a loop as the program counter. going into the appropriate state based on variables.

[leejoramo]

Oregon Trail goes back to 1971 as this first installment is 50 Years of Interactive Fiction explains

https://if50.substack.com/p/1971-the-oregon-trail

[alberth]

Does this work?

Using macOS/Safari - all I see is a prompt with text saying "PRODOS BASIC 1.5 COPYRIGHT APPLE 1983-92"

EDIT: Never mind, you need to click the "Run" button in bottom right for it to work.

[jmull → alberth]

My old basic skills asserted themselves…

You can type “run” at the prompt.

Looks like you need to type capital letters.

[Maursault → jmull]

As usual with browser emulation, iDevice fails to show the keyboard, nor can one copy and paste letters or words in the terminal. Apple's fault. Still cool.

[sparrish]

This is the first time I ever made it all the way to Oregon.