Of course with the whole game being played from a DOS prompt, you don’t want to be typing any unwarranted DOS commands while playing this (other than dir which gives a verb list). I would imagine it’s not the most practical language for the job but it clearly works. It’s kind of ingenious really and shows how much you can do with batch scripting. Presumably all the variables for the game are stored in the DOS environment.
look lamp, then lamp is passed as a parameter into the batch file. These files pass along their calls to the main advent script which does the heavy lifting. Each command in the game is actually a call to run the relevant batch file. Running the setup generates a load of little batch files for all the commands in the game. These text adventures play entirely from a tweaked command prompt so there is a look.bat and n, s, e and w.bat files, etc. This maxes out the environment space in DOS and will fix the errors running these games. The relevant line is shell=c:\dos\ /P /E:1024. To fix this, you just need to edit your config.sys file and reboot. You then type advent setup to start, except I discovered at this point that with all this batch file trickery going on, DOS ran out of environment space. The filename is actually reversed and in this case should be advent.bat, so it simply needs renaming and copying into an otherwise empty directory. To find these hidden games, you need to search through the files for each game and look for the one starting with tab. These were all created by Arthur DiBianca, a coder at Origin during the 90’s. Probably the most significant Easter eggs ever to make their way into Origin products were 3 text adventure games hidden away in the files for Privateer, Privateer – Righteous Fire and Wings Of Glory. When I do get round to it, there are still old games to play so lets start with a handful of Origin games I forgot about when I was originally blogging through them all. I’d like to say I’ll be posting more regularly this year but realistically that is unlikely to happen. It’s time at last to get around to the first post of 2017.
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