Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-19
06:49:17
 |  Twin Kingdom Valley
Twin kingdom Valley, nice little text adventure game. Never finished it but play it now and then. The only thing I hated about it was the blinding background colour of white.
When running the .prg version I would use the following before loading to make the board black and the screen a dark blue.
COLOR4,1:COLOR0,7,2
Looks much better and doesn't clash with any of the text colours. 
Today I thought I'd load the tap image for a change and I was greeted with something else! Now I know why the screen colour was white. 
http://i50.tinypic.com/id67mo.gif
Doesn't really spoil things as you can type "QUIT" to start back over to push the mess up the screen.
anyway... Something you don't normally run in to ever day and wonder if it's worth adding the colour scheme for others on the TKV page?
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2012-07-20
13:41:31
 | Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
There is a picture version out there, the Crown conversion.
I've finished this game and it's a lot of fun.
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Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-20
16:34:04
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Pictures are in my head, the same ones I invented back in 1985.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2012-07-20
16:44:47
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Looks like the TAP version has some initialization code and data before $1000, that is what's visible on the screen if you change the background color. It really wouldn't have been a big deal to perform a "clear screen" command, it's actually quite unusual for a game NOT to do that. But, even so, this is probably not the direct reason why the screen is white, it's just a side effect. The game uses specific color codes for the messages, so those colors were intentionally programmed in It's cool to note it here that it can be changed, if one desires, but since it's not really anything official, we probably don't need to add it to the game's detail page.
I also love this adventure (although I didn't even know about the C16 version). On my trip home I found my old pencil-drawn maps for it Because the game is kind of open ended (and somewhat random due to the NPCs), for a long time I didn't know it can be completed. But eventually I found the solution somewhere, like Lavina said it can be won.
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Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-20
18:33:16
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Yeah that's cool. Thanks for explaining some finer details.
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-20
21:56:35
 | Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Slightly still on topic, did anyone else actually beat Williamsburg (Adventure 3) back in the day or am I the first known?, as I put the solution here, and it is just such an easy game to figure out lol.
I just say it as it's the first text adventure I actually beat without cheating. If I can work out how to use The Graphic Adventure Creator again on the C64, then I will convert that extremely silly game over to it.
I remember when I bought it thinking it was an arcade style game and being totally flummoxed when I first loaded it up. Still, fond memories which is why I pointlessly put it up on my youtube page I guess.
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Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-21
00:59:18
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Nope, saw the green screen and switch it off.
That was the trick. Any game that never had screen shots on the back were sometimes hiding something, not always the case but sometimes it was bad and this didn't just apply to text adventures. 
And in some cases the cover art work sold the game.
Treasure Hunter art work sets the scene before you have even loaded it up, but if you never took a look at the inside cover having already seen what else was already in the Solar range then by cover alone Treasure Hunter for the win! Not a bad game as it goes any way.
One cool thing about emulation is that you can go back to these games and enjoy them without having your real hardware on for hours burning away when you could be playing Adventures In Time on it instead, that's something you want to see on a real machine. 
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-26
03:58:28
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Ah give it a chance, the adventure is so ridiculous it made me lol.
Anyway, with my limited coding knowledge, I have managed to convert Williamsburg onto the C64 using the CBM prg Studio. A Great tool. No G.A.C needed.
http://www.commodore16.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1247
My first game. Yay! lol.
Unfortunately for the wrong machine. But now I kinda know half on what I'm doing, I'm thinking about what C64 text adventures I could possibly convert over from the C64 onto our platform
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Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-26
04:49:02
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Have faith, the game is in my collection, upstairs with many others awaiting for that rainy day when it will come back out to play. I had it in my hands only a couple of days ago but then the Sun came out - Honest!
Maybe you should add a screen shot on your Lemon post or have they band that option because it's still so busy? Not posted on Lemon in 12 or so years, forgot my PW lol
If you look about there are, or were dedicated web sites devoted to text adventures from 8 bit systems my come across something unique for the borrowing.
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-26
09:15:50
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
well they can see the the screenshots from the link. I guess I didn't add them on lemon64 coz basic text adventures all look the same. Might change that later.
I posted it up on a busy c64 facebook page with screenshots though.
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Posted By
Hans
on 2012-07-26
14:06:47
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Hi,
Sixteen Plus wrote:
....give it a chance, the adventure is so ridiculous it made me lol.
Anyway, with my limited coding knowledge, I have managed to convert Williamsburg onto the C64 using the CBM prg Studio....
There's quite a number of clever basic adventures out in the field. I'd like to do a translation for one ore two my most liked ones.
I don't have the Windows based CBM prg studio yet (I prefer to access the WWW via a linux machine). Does the program allow renumbering of the program lines? For translations, this might be necessary since additional lines could be required. So it would be convenient to have the original lines 10 and 20 and to have the ability to insert lines No. 11, 12, etc.
Reg's,
Hans.
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-26
14:18:14
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
yeah you can add and renumber the lines, but it all has to be done manually, it won't automatically renumber everything else. You don't need to press ENTER everytime you do an edit though which is handy.
I find it easier to use than editing listings in Commodore BASIC. Pretty simple to use and it's multi-format across the main 8-bit Commodores
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2012-07-26
15:15:12
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Congrats on your first C64 release
For pure BASIC games, I think the "nicest" thing to do is to make it runnable on both Plus/4 and C64. It's easy to determine which machine we're on, and the colors can be set with POKEs even for the Plus/4 (so that the listing doesn't look funny even in BASIC 2.0). Possibily they can be made to run even on a VIC-20.
For some of the machine language games, conversion is also relatively easy. In 2004 I went on a spree and converted several games (both BASIC and ML), mostly that we would have all the Scott Adams ones. What I really wanted to do was some of the Level 9 games (e.g. Erik The Viking or Red Moon) - I always liked the graphics in those. Where I got stuck was this: I could not unpack the game on C64 and save it so that it can run on its own... Possibly due to the C64's unintuitive (see, I managed not to say stupid... d'oh!) memory management.
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-26
17:47:06
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Thanks. I'm a total noob compared but might be able to convert something over the our system
Well, I didn't see the point of making this run on both systems seeing as it's already available for us. However a game that's not on either systems would make sense.
I'd love to learn machine code. but all the LDA, STA, DEC and other functions are way beyond me.
Arcade games in ML I imagine would be even harder to convert from C64 because of lack of sprites and SID for our system. Must take lots of complete recoding.
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Posted By
MIK
on 2012-07-26
23:23:34
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
Sometimes it pays to write stuff down so you have a record which saves you digging about to find the stuff you want again when you need it most.
For future reference on the pokes:
* = 0 to 255
Boarder colour on 264 machines:
POKE65305,*
Screen colour on 264 machines:
POKE65301,*
10 POKE65305,255:POKE65301,255 (will set the screen & boarder to bright yellow)
Do a HARD RESET:
Go to the monitor and type the following. After the first line just press RETURN and it will auto be ready for the next to be added, again just type as I've put it down.
A 2000 LDA #$FF
STA $FF19
LDA#$FF
STA $FF15
RTS
Now press RETURN once more to exit out after RTS. Type X and press RETURN to get back into BASIC.
Type: SYS8192
Congrats, you have just typed your first machine code program!
In simple terms because I'm not much better my self haha!
In memory FF19 is the boarder and FF15 is the screen. We need to load a number, LDA and then store that number to whats found at memory address FF19 or FF15. RTS is to return back from where it came from just like a return if a GOSUB was used before hand. As we jumped to memory address 2000 from basic using SYS8192 then once the program see's an RTS it will return back to BASIC, if used in machine code it would return back to the machine code program where GOSUB would be JMP or rather JUMP.
If you want to list your MC prog then type:
D 2000
Anyways this was just for fun, a mess about. Thought I'd add the screen POKEs if you needed them, as for the colours... have a mess about.
As for anything else. I'm just as useless.
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Posted By
MMS
on 2012-07-27
10:09:02
 | Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
good old days... When i was 15, i bought the book "plus/4 programming in machine code". At first read it was in chinese. The second was not so much better. It took a while to do my first prg, and to be honest i have never used anything else than built in monitor... Maybe just made my life more complex.
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Posted By
retroscener
on 2012-07-27
11:37:14
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
I kinda know what some of the commands mean, like JMP=GOTO and JSR & RTS = GOSUB & RETURN.
I also know about the LDA #$-- to STA $---- subroutine (storing a value into a location) but that's about all I know solely because of all the game cheats I used to enter lol.
I'm still not familiar with the whole memory map on where everything is stored, but some good colour changing tips for me to remember there. Cheers.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2012-08-07
14:57:57
| Re: Twin Kingdom Valley
I just want to follow up to something I said above, about getting a runnable PRG file on a C64: in VICE, you have to type "bank ram" before saving the memory (otherwise, you end up saving ROM, and not the program). This is likely blindingly obvious for the C64 folks But for me it took quite a while just now to figure out. So, I'm not promising anything, but it's possible that I might do another easy conversion, just for the fun of it.
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