Galahad and the Holy Grail?

[doctor_x]

Is anyone else as in awe of this game as I am?

 

I've always been into adventure games since the first time I played atari 2600 "adventure". i love the fact that there is this unknown world lurking beyond the visible screen complete with tunnels, hidden doorways, and dragons.

 

when i upgraded into atari 8bit, i was much more about warez, bbs's, and telecom stuff - but i still played some of those games that i downloaded, and one of them happened to be galahad.

 

WOAH.. it was like 2600 adventure on steroids and even though the graphics werent much better, the dynamics of play certainly were.. i also loved the fact that it seems like there are several "easter eggs" as far as touching certain walls that will KILL you, and certain walls seem to drag you into another room..

 

i developed such a love for it that i rarely play it and have never let myself play it enough that i might finish it.. yes, i probably need therapy for something like that, but thats just the way it goes.

 

anyone else like galahad? anyone who does have any suggestions for other games on whatever atari platform , or any other platform that bears similarity to galahad?

 

i've played apshai, gauntlet, haunted house, adventure 2, and none of them really come close to galahad for me..

 

 

doc

[phaeron]

I loved this game as well, but it's been a LONG time.

 

AFAIK, there are at least two versions of this game:

• Uses playfield collision, can't resurrect.
  
• Doesn't use playfield collision, resurrect with OPTION.
  

 

The version that uses playfield collision is the one where you bounce off solid walls; it is occasionally prone to you getting stuck in the wall and sliding to your death. The other version has more stable collision and is also much easier due to the ability to resurrect. However, you can't cheat as easily in that version in an emulator.

 

There are a large number of rooms in the game as well as several keys. A few of them have invisible triggers. I only got to the Grail once -- it's easier if you kill off the dragons early. In one of the later screens, there's a double-speed creature that's so fast that it's hard to avoid getting killed again immediately after you resurrect. I think I tried the hand grenade once and ended up making the game unsolvable by blocking one of the narrow paths.

 

I started mapping out Galahad, but it quickly got very complex and the Photoshop file became a mess of overlapping layers. At this point I might succumb to temptation and hack the game to extract the maps....

[doctor_x]

are you referring to the spider as the creature who is so fast?

 

if so, i think i ended up using the grenade to kill it... i remember i forgot to load the translator and made it this far once and when i blew up the spider the game decided to crash.

 

would VERY much enjoy playing galahad on a larger LCD TV..

 

I loved this game as well, but it's been a LONG time.

 

AFAIK, there are at least two versions of this game:

• Uses playfield collision, can't resurrect.
  
• Doesn't use playfield collision, resurrect with OPTION.
  

 

The version that uses playfield collision is the one where you bounce off solid walls; it is occasionally prone to you getting stuck in the wall and sliding to your death. The other version has more stable collision and is also much easier due to the ability to resurrect. However, you can't cheat as easily in that version in an emulator.

 

There are a large number of rooms in the game as well as several keys. A few of them have invisible triggers. I only got to the Grail once -- it's easier if you kill off the dragons early. In one of the later screens, there's a double-speed creature that's so fast that it's hard to avoid getting killed again immediately after you resurrect. I think I tried the hand grenade once and ended up making the game unsolvable by blocking one of the narrow paths.

 

I started mapping out Galahad, but it quickly got very complex and the Photoshop file became a mess of overlapping layers. At this point I might succumb to temptation and hack the game to extract the maps....

[Ralphy Rocket]

I had it on the apple II, I never played it because I was always waiting to have time to really get into it- Never DID! I did'nt know it available for the 8bit...I'll make time for that...

 

Ralph

[tjb]

I loved Galahad. It was one of the first games I played when I got my first 1050 as a teenager. It's a great game if not a bit frustrating because of the randomness. The author is now a Javascript architect at Yahoo and creator of JSON. A couple of years ago I was looking to become more knowledgeable about Javascript and ran across some presentations given by the author at Yahoo. I thought that was pretty cool.

 

I've completed the game but basically all the planets have to be in alignment to make it happen. There is a way to kill the "monster moth" but I think it's more a quirk in the program rather than something the author intended.

 

IIRC there are three areas that require keys but pressing SELECT at the beginning makes these areas open and makes it somewhat easier. Also, I do know that the game is prone to locking up on the XL/XE machines unless you use a translator.

 

 

tjb

[doctor_x]

Really?

 

I thought galahad was an APX game and only released for the Atari?

 

I had it on the apple II, I never played it because I was always waiting to have time to really get into it- Never DID! I did'nt know it available for the 8bit...I'll make time for that...

 

Ralph

[Goochman]

Galahad was also one of the first games I played on my 800 - I enjoyed it but was frustrated. A friend and I had alot of fun with the 'Holy Grenede' and knew we needed to get to the 'boat'.

 

With its funky collision detection we figured that if you blew up the boat room jussst right you could hit the entry box for the ship which we did and finished the game (whatever comes after that I cant remember)

[Ralphy Rocket]

Really?

 

I thought galahad was an APX game and only released for the Atari?

 

I had it on the apple II, I never played it because I was always waiting to have time to really get into it- Never DID! I did'nt know it available for the 8bit...I'll make time for that...

 

Ralph

 

My mind is playing tricks on me!!! I know i played some thing on the apple that was just like GAHG, I google it for the apple and found nothing....which makes me think i'm just loosing my mind! but i can swear it was the same thing (cursor moving through static maps). I down loaded the APX ATR yesterdad and me and my son (5 years old) were plying it...and its what I remember on the apple.....

 

I don't know whats worse ...dynamic memory...or my memory........

 

Ralph

[phaeron]

are you referring to the spider as the creature who is so fast?

 

if so, i think i ended up using the grenade to kill it... i remember i forgot to load the translator and made it this far once and when i blew up the spider the game decided to crash.

 

This is the creature I'm talking about. I'd forgotten that the spider was even faster than this one, but this beast is nasty because you have so little room to maneuver and you have to go in and out of this room several times. I want to say it's a dragon of some sort, but it's hard to tell.

[phaeron]

Galahad was also one of the first games I played on my 800 - I enjoyed it but was frustrated. A friend and I had alot of fun with the 'Holy Grenede' and knew we needed to get to the 'boat'.

 

With its funky collision detection we figured that if you blew up the boat room jussst right you could hit the entry box for the ship which we did and finished the game (whatever comes after that I cant remember)

 

You are correct. I disassembled the room structure (attached) and it turns out that the only way you can escape from the final series of rooms in the APX version is to blow up the boat and skate by it into the room on the left.

 

It also turns out that the Antic Software version has a number of room fixes as well as the resurrect option and the better collision detection:

• $20 (Starting room): Top-left area extended to corner.
  
• $30 (Grail room): Grail no longer sits on impassable area; required since you can no longer bump your way into a wall
  
• $3E (Spider trap room): Corner holes of left side have been plugged.
  
• $3F (Gray castle): Corner holes plugged and lighter gray used; castle gate is no longer lethal.
  
• $53 (Black castle upstairs 2): Arrow added pointing left.
  
• $64-67 (spider strobing rooms): Replaced by teleport maze.
  
• $6E (Uphill ramp 2): Hole opened on bottom to match rooms 1 and 3, presumably for collision change reasons.
  
• $76/77/79/7a (Useless flashing rooms): Replaced by teleport maze.
  
• $7d (2600 throwback room 2): Top corner holes plugged.
  

 

The change to room $3F is the most important one, for an unexpected reason. The arrow room next to the Holy Hand Grenade room (room $41) is peculiar in that it has an up exit, but the top border is completely closed. If you bomb it and go north, you end up in front of the green door and can then backtrack to the gray castle. The gates on the gray castle no longer kill you in this version and instead teleport you inside the black castle, which has a path back to the lower-left corner of the main map. Bring the Grail to the starting screen, and you win. The downside is that you can no longer use the bomb on the killer rabbit in room $43, which would be canon if you're into Monty Python.

[doctor_x]

Man am I glad I started this thread - though I'm not about to look at the room map... Stumbling upon "new" stuff was what caused me to love the game so much and I havent come anywhere near finishing it yet...

 

Also would be curious to know what Apple game/version that was that was being talked about earlier..

 

great stuff.

 

 

Galahad was also one of the first games I played on my 800 - I enjoyed it but was frustrated. A friend and I had alot of fun with the 'Holy Grenede' and knew we needed to get to the 'boat'.

 

With its funky collision detection we figured that if you blew up the boat room jussst right you could hit the entry box for the ship which we did and finished the game (whatever comes after that I cant remember)

 

You are correct. I disassembled the room structure (attached) and it turns out that the only way you can escape from the final series of rooms in the APX version is to blow up the boat and skate by it into the room on the left.

 

It also turns out that the Antic Software version has a number of room fixes as well as the resurrect option and the better collision detection:

• $20 (Starting room): Top-left area extended to corner.
  
• $30 (Grail room): Grail no longer sits on impassable area; required since you can no longer bump your way into a wall
  
• $3E (Spider trap room): Corner holes of left side have been plugged.
  
• $3F (Gray castle): Corner holes plugged and lighter gray used; castle gate is no longer lethal.
  
• $53 (Black castle upstairs 2): Arrow added pointing left.
  
• $64-67 (spider strobing rooms): Replaced by teleport maze.
  
• $6E (Uphill ramp 2): Hole opened on bottom to match rooms 1 and 3, presumably for collision change reasons.
  
• $76/77/79/7a (Useless flashing rooms): Replaced by teleport maze.
  
• $7d (2600 throwback room 2): Top corner holes plugged.
  

 

The change to room $3F is the most important one, for an unexpected reason. The arrow room next to the Holy Hand Grenade room (room $41) is peculiar in that it has an up exit, but the top border is completely closed. If you bomb it and go north, you end up in front of the green door and can then backtrack to the gray castle. The gates on the gray castle no longer kill you in this version and instead teleport you inside the black castle, which has a path back to the lower-left corner of the main map. Bring the Grail to the starting screen, and you win. The downside is that you can no longer use the bomb on the killer rabbit in room $43, which would be canon if you're into Monty Python.

[ralphbutler]

Galahad was also one of the first games I played on my 800 - I enjoyed it but was frustrated. A friend and I had alot of fun with the 'Holy Grenede' and knew we needed to get to the 'boat'.

 

With its funky collision detection we figured that if you blew up the boat room jussst right you could hit the entry box for the ship which we did and finished the game (whatever comes after that I cant remember)

 

Wait.... you can actually FINISH this game? I never knew that and used to play it extensively way back when. Hated that you would drop what you were carrying when the black knight came out..... never got much farther than into the castle and just got stuck. Will have to dust this off!

 

-rcb

[doctor_x]

ralph,

 

you definitely should.. certainly one of the more creative games although obviously inspired by Adventure ..

 

fabulous game..

 

Galahad was also one of the first games I played on my 800 - I enjoyed it but was frustrated. A friend and I had alot of fun with the 'Holy Grenede' and knew we needed to get to the 'boat'.

 

With its funky collision detection we figured that if you blew up the boat room jussst right you could hit the entry box for the ship which we did and finished the game (whatever comes after that I cant remember)

 

Wait.... you can actually FINISH this game? I never knew that and used to play it extensively way back when. Hated that you would drop what you were carrying when the black knight came out..... never got much farther than into the castle and just got stuck. Will have to dust this off!

 

-rcb

[luckybuck]

Well, in 2012 I solved the game and asked Douglas Crockford about the end. It is true, the 1st round is in daylight, the 2nd during the night. According to Douglas, a true knight will never die. So, you will never see an 'End' in the game. But the game is finished or repeats endlessly, when you get the following picture:

 

This is the map with all(!) rooms:

[rhfil]

I recently dug out my Atari stuff out of storage to see if any of it still worked. I have a 400, and an 800 with a 810 Happy drive and a Percom drive. I had no joysticks. The 800 worked but the space bar did not make contact so I found the connections and soldered two wires to them as a sub. The Percom does not work and the Happy seems to be fussy. Some of my power suppliers also were not working. So I bought power suppliers, an XL, two 1050's and four joysticks. Have been testing most of my games to see if they work and have found a number that have gone bad. One of them is Galahad which is a shame as I really enjoyed the game. I did manage to finish it and got to the shrine. I assumed that was the end and never went any further. Loved the humor that you need to kill the rabbit with the Holy Hand Grenade. The other game that I loved but does not seem to work is "Seven Cities of Gold".

[+slx]

Get yourself a sio2sd or similar and you will be able to play both on real hardware again. I also enjoyed Galahad but never finished it.

 

 

Gesendet von meinem iPhone mit Tapatalk

[rhfil]

How exactly does that work? Where do we get the programs for the card reader? Is it possible to transfer programs downloaded on a pc to an Atari?

[luckybuck]

Yes, it is:

 

SIO2SD

SIO2USB

 

further, some serial cables connect to the Atari via the 850 interface.

[rhfil]

So the SIO2SD connects to a pc via the SIO2USB cable and then a serial cable to an 850? Unfortunately I do not have an 850 and see none on ebay. Will keep looking.

 

Thanks

[luckybuck]

No no no,

 

all(!) are stand alone solutions!

 

a) SIO2USB

b) SIO2SD

c) serial cable connect to the Atari via the 850 interface

 

for a)

please see the pictures attached

 

for b)

please see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW7l-fxJxVc#t=333

 

[+Philsan]

So the SIO2SD connects to a pc via the SIO2USB cable and then a serial cable to an 850? Unfortunately I do not have an 850 and see none on ebay. Will keep looking.

 

Thanks

First post of Topic for newbies

[luckybuck]

Thanks Philsan, didn't knew the site.

[Fractal9091]

Interesting solution.  I played what sounds like the first (APX?) version.  Using the Holy Hand Grenade seemed to wreck too much of the terrain, so I tended to try to get past the rabbit (I was never sure if that enemy was a rabbit or a stork delivering a baby, which is also likely to end the quest of a knight searching for the grail) using either the lance or the shield.
 

I was never able to beat the dragon as a kid, but I found an alternate solution.  Because of the Atari's hardware limitations, if there were more than about 5 player+items+enemies on the screen at a time, the game had to cycle between which of them it was watching for collision detection.  If you gathered a lot of items in a room at once, the player could use this effect to push through walls.  I would go and find all of the keys and other items, and bring them to the cave in the middle of the map, where it has an opening to view the ship.  With 5+ items there, I could walk through the water to the ship, enter the maze, and find the Grail.  I'd then walk back across the water carrying the Grail, exit the cave, and bring the Grail home.  The items remain where you left them when the new game begins, so it was relatively easy to go and win again, at night, as many times as I wanted.

[samiam]

Since I ended up writing a quick and dirty JSON parser yesterday (There wasn’t, until yesterday, any public domain Lua JSON parser, until I wrote one), I gave the JSON parser the name “Black Castle” in honor of the almost impossible “Black Castle” puzzle this game has. Why do I bring up JSON? Because, this game, as mentioned above, was written by the same guy who later on invented JSON.

 

Warning: Spoilers ahead

 

The game has a very difficult puzzle where a secret passage was hidden in the black castle; the passage was so difficult to find, I had to run the program through a 6502 monitor to find it back in the 1980s. My dad (rest in peace) had written a 2 kilobyte 6502 monitor which could hide itself where Atari put their floating point library (making it immune from copy protection which looked for ROMs in the $COOO-$CFFF range); I knew how to program 6502 and use his monitor. While playing Galahad and the Holy Grail, I used the monitor to flip the page used to view which room we were looking at without changing the colors for the room; this let me see all of the invisible mazes and secret passages the game has. When looking at the black castle (which yes, I fairly extensively explored without assistance, but failed to find the passage), I finally saw the secret passage to the hidden black castle maze.

 

While I never finished the game back then — that rabbit is just too much of a pain to deal with without the ability to save the machine state the way modern emulators can — I knew the solution was to use the grenade to blow up the ship room multiple times until it was possible to go from the fairly easy to reach left entrance of that room to the almost impossible to reach top entrance of the ship room.

 

I am not the only one who could find this passage in the black castle without assistance; a 1984 reviewer of "Galahad and the Holy Grail" had the same issue: In "The book of Atari Software 1984", the reviewer could not find this secret passage until Crockford sent them a map and hint sheet.

 

Indeed, in the 1985 (?) Antic revision of this game, there is an arrow in the black castle pointing to the secret passage. In addition, Crockford (I believe he’s the one who revised the game for the Antic bugfix release) had the gray castle (whose entrance kills you in the original 1982 APX version of the game) teleport you to the same place as the black castle’s secret passage does.

 

After writing my “Black Castle” JSON parser, I felt inspired to finally finish this game. As suspected, once I got past the rabbit (with the sword and loading the emulator’s state just before entering the rabbit room until it approached me in a direction I could kill it with), it was relatively straightforward going through the mazes until one is in the dragon room. The dragon can be killed with multiple loads using a modern emulator and saving the state before entering that room; once the dragon is killed, I had to go through some more mazes, including frustrating invisible mazes, until I was in the grail room.

 

Once I picked up the grail, since I was playing the original APX version of the game, I can not blow up the “right arrow room” (to the left of the Pac Man room) and use its top exit to get to the gray castle which, in the Antic version of the game, leads to the black castle secret and eventually back to the starting location where one needs to place the grail to win the game.

 

Instead, I had to blow up the ship room twice, which is a cycle of killing the two spiders, the rabbit (ugh), then getting the grenade from the Pac Man room to the ship room, dying, going all of the way back to the Pac Man room, killing the spiders and rabbit again, then blowing up the ship room a second time.

 

As it turns out, while the usual passage to the Pac Man room consists of getting both keys and then opening the gates in the white castle (the first gate is opened with the yellow key, which is located in the teleport maze just before the entrance to the left side of the ship room; the second gate is opened with the green key, which is located just before the maze of 2600-style rooms in the duck forest), it’s actually possible to get to the Pac Man room without any keys: In the room north of the Excalibur room (in the maze one gets to from the black castle secret passage), there is a hidden teleport to a room with some light pink parts in the wall.  Touching any of these light pink parts is a hidden shortcut from the post-Excalibur maze to the Pac Man room.

 

Indeed, it’s possible to win the game without hitting “Select” to disable the locked doors and without getting any keys: After blowing up the ship room twice, one does not need the pink key (also in the area around the Excalibur room) to get to the grail; one can simply enter the ship room from on its left side (in the room just after the “blinking spider” room) then find a passage to a remaining piece of the ship which teleports the player to the difficult maze just before the grail room. Once one has the grail, one goes through the destroyed ship room again and exits on the left, then goes north and up the mountain to get back to the starting area and finally the starting room to win the game.

 

And that’s how the original APX version of Galahad and the Holy Grail is won.

 

To Crockford’s credit, writing a JSON parser was actually easier than winning this old game of his. Just as the Antic version of Galahad fixes annoyances like the hidden black castle passage and the need to blow up the ship room multiple times before winning, my JSON parser fixes JSON annoyances such as adding support for comments (via standard Python style # comments), allowing bare words for object keys (we need to parse bare words with JSON anyway since “null”, “true”, and “false” are bare words in the spec), and, unlike other excessively pedantic strict JSON parsers, allowing a comma to be placed after the final item in an array or JSON object. I once had a job where I had to use a particular limited domain specific language to translate our internal data in to JSON format; the language was so limited, I tried to add a final comma to a list of items in an object, which Python’s JSON parser doesn’t accept. So, I was forced to put "__ignoreme": "dummy" } at the end of every JSON list; people complained in meetings multiple times about that dummy JSON item, and I had to keep explaining why I had to add it, and how Python’s JSON parser doesn’t allow a final comma at the end of a list. Which is why, now that I have finally written my own JSON parser, I made very sure a final comma is allowed.

Edited September 5, 2021 by samiam

[DavidD]

I have a copy of this somewhere in my closet, but I'm not sure which version -- probably the APX one, as I think it had an APX manual.

 

I just remember the game freezing upon explosion effects...

 

I need to try it again.