Castlequest (1980)

By Michael S. Holtzman and Mark Kershenblatt.

Provenance

The U.S. Copyright Office has a deposit related to this game: TXu000091366

On 2021-03-02, Mark Kershenblatt received 78 pages of paper copies from the USCTO. He scanned them in and sent the scans to Arthur O'Dwyer, in the form of two PDFs. Arthur rotated and concatenated the PDFs into the single 78-page PDF in this repository, castlequest.pdf.

Arthur O'Dwyer manually transcribed the PDF into the plain text file in this repository, castlequest.ocr.txt. (If you find any places where the transcription differs from the original PDF, Arthur will pay a "bug bounty" of $5 per error! Open a pull request on this repository or send me an email.)

The src directory contains .f and .dat files that have been mechanically extracted from castlequest.ocr.txt using command-line tools such as cut -b 17-88.

How to compile and play

I'm still deciding how to organize the patches in the long term, so these instructions may change. For now, my patches are in a separate git branch named patches:

git checkout patches
cd src
make
./cquest | asa

In order for make to work, you'll need to have either f77 or gfortran in your path.

In order for your input to be recognized, you'll need to enter all your text in ALL CAPS. I recommend turning on CAPS LOCK while you play.

The game's output uses "carriage control": when it prints the character 0 in column 1, it's expecting that the printer hardware will turn that into an extra newline. Naturally, modern terminals don't do that. But many POSIX systems (including Mac OSX) come with a utility program named asa that can interpret those carriage-control characters for you.

If your computer lacks asa, you can hack it together in a couple lines of your favorite scripting language; a Python implementation is provided in the src directory.

./cquest | python ./asa.py