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Adventure Construction Set Problems


McDeath

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I've still been going through all platforms. Having finished recording the music i am now creating tilesets. After that i'll go through the data of each version and hopefully create decent spreadsheets and documentation. Its a god awful slow process when i have other things going on. I did note one error on the apple disks. It seems it freezes when i try to let the appleII emulated version try and let ACS complete the adventure. Its a tad annoying as that means i can't gauge on how exact each version is for all functions. I may try another emulator. Its not a huge priority at this time. Finishing just tilesets will lift some of the stagnation i feel atm.

At least its more than ive ever done with the program. I still hope to try and make FRACAS on ACS since they should be similar. There are some glaring things in each original i find annoying esp in graphics.
I learned why there are character-monsters in the things category and its because when creating or using THINGS you can't use the character-creature pics on them. I believe you can only use from THINGS & TERRAIN. Annoying again and i bet ACK doesnt have that limitation. You cant really edit THINGS in rooms like characters-creatures. Its probably in the manual.
I have noticed some graphics for particular adventures used in wiki and other sites. One is kingmaker that changes the empty blue to a grassland and changes the sky blue background to a light green. I cant find that amiga module.
The wikipedia has another example i scratch my head at as well.
50 submitted adventures lost in spaces d never converted to emulation. The adventureconstructionset.com site is dead and nowjust an ad.
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And i solved my appleII problem with the "let ACS finish adventure." The online disks were messed up for creation "make an adventure disk." Someone submitted to me fixed versions of those. But, it turns out the fixed version could NOT let ACS finish. On a bloody whim i used the originals and BAM!!!

 

IT WORKED!

 

Note: i depressed SCROLL LOCK to speed up the emulator; otherwise it would take 30-40 minutes to finish. Leaving your finger on scrolllock in applewin finishes the task in a minute or two. Neat stuff. When you mess with Lands of Adventuria or Rivers of Light you will notice weird stuff as names for the regions beyond whats in the game.

 

So, still lots to do and probably no enthusiasts of ACS left on the planet. Ha.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Update time:

Man those release dates:
Release:
1984 (C64)
1985 (Apple II)
1986 (Amiga)
1987 (MS-DOS)

 

So, c64 was the flagship even though I swore it was AppleII.

The rest of this post I might get some flak (esp the dos version as it is a pain and I had to package it the way I did rather than let others try to install it via floppy drive (but hey.. I have a usb floppy now so HUZZAH).

 

I've been posting here and there on Melon64, Lemon64 and Jolt Country.

 

I've been working on trying to piece together all of the old Electronic Arts Adventure Construction Set Data I can. And let me tell you, it has been a pain in the ass since sites have dropped off and there has been little in the way of people from the past caring about it. Oh there is the niche group which is great but all the old adventures in storage seem gone. Maybe, if I can get enough attention brought back to this then they can be rearchived and maybe even Stuart Smith will pop up and give a nod. So, I will put up some stuff I have worked on. So far it has been getting copies of every thing for emulators and dosbox. God this was a headache in and of itself as not everything was available and I had to go through hoops and old broken laptops with shitty floppy drives and destroyed OS's with barely DOS on them to finally getting a copy of an emulated AppleII version that wasn't entirely corrupt so I could MAKE adventure disks. From there it was hell getting ACS to finish adventures and figuring out the emulators.

 

When I finally got all up and running to life-support standards I started to work on recording the sounds and music (as youtube had pretty iffy versions out). Once I did this and edited them via audacity and tried to clean them up the best I could considering they were entirely from emulation. (remember.. I can't program so that type of ripping and shit is beyond me).

 

After that, I have been spending months creating tilesets for all the basic modules for each platform. A real shitter was that I had to draw all the appleII tiles by hand on ms-paint as the screenshot cut/paste and copy just looked like crap. I can't say the final result is all to great but it is clean for the pixels in png and that's what counts if one is going to use them in say ACK or some other builder program. I have created tilesetes, individual tiles, and comparison sheets. this took ages it seems but it puts me up to the next level of working on the data in each module. Eventually, I will get an additional manual written with the shortcuts, dos and don'ts, and problems with the engine. There are some things that annoy the crap out of me and one would be speed of creation and drawing inside the program. Lordy is that slow and tedious.

I still have hopes to convert Stuart Smith's FRACA from appleII to an ACS module for each platform. I wouldn't mind turning the Amiga version in a go to for even the older graphics on the other platforms (ie playing the amiga version with appleII graphics). The amiga has the most color and extra sounds. I must say my cleaned up versions sound better and I'm more partial to the C64 musical score and sound in many cases. Maybe if I work on the ACK I can just bypass all that guff except for the purists who won't play or work on anything but ACS instead (yeah.. like there are many of those around.. )

 

So here's what I have for you:
ACS Compilation version 1
This is what I started with and some of it is incomplete. It has some extras that I will eventually edit and try to clean up like old articles and manuals.

 

Stuart Smith's Other Games
Yeah, I included these for nostalgia purposes and if you wanted to try them out. I still have hopes to try and convert to acs but some of it is just impossible considering what the games entail and ACS just cannot do.

 

ACS Music/Sound Archive
After all my painstaking work I hope these came out OK. Some of the sounds are god awful and I don't know if that's the emulators or just the version period. Eh, it is what it is and back then it may have been great.

 

ACS COMPLETE TILESETS
I sure hope its complete. It is all the basic stuff in the types of modules for each of the 4 platforms (C64, AppleII, Amiga, DOS) (the modules being Land of Adventuria, Rivers of Light, Fantasy Set, Spy/Mystery Set, Science-Fiction Set, and Galactic Agent (Amiga Only)). I didn't include the modules out there yet or the latest entry from 2018 by a talented fellow. I will get to those later after all the basics are done.

 

The Basic Files for the Modules on their respectable platforms
A lot of this is repat of v1.0 but there is some clean up here and I included a disk so you can let ACS finish adventures on the AppleII. Basically you should be able to do all the basics here provided you have the correct emulators and dosbox. Its old shit and only oldies will give a damn but there ya go. I'll put up some screenshots of tilesets eventually or you can just download that and take a look for yourself. Maybe, I can get a website up and resurrect the ACS project.

 

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And for those who complain its too small then just copy it and look at it under your own viewing program. I spent a a hell of a lot of time to get to t here and the files are available to peruse as you see fit.
I'm hardly done yet dissecting the games on all the platforms. It actually doesn't seem like much and I'm sure some programmer could have ripped these easily and produced similar tilesets and audio in no time flat.

......... I am not that person and I have to use the old ways of drawing on mspaint, copy/past, creating templates, recording and editing etc etc etc.

Edited by McDeath
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  • 2 weeks later...

Wow this is amazing... I was a huge fan of ACS on Apple II but never found another person with it around me. It remember it was really easy to use and loved Aventuria.

 

I also remember all the auto generated quests were more or oess the samw, but it was neat to do some rooms and let ACS "finish" the game for you.

 

Modern day equivalent would be something like RPG Maker, I guess, but it lacks the simplicity of ACK. I don't think anybody tried to remake it, I suppose the Amiga version is as good as it gets.

Edited by Newsdee
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  • 2 years later...

Well, Jolt bbs seems dead.  I haven't done much of anything with ACS since these posts.  Things came up over the years.  I did get a new laptop so I might fire up some win10 compatible emulators and recheck everything.  Seems like these days my head is in a heavy fog and doing anything is a monumentous task.  
 

I've been eyeing some other old games like Aardvark's Dungeon of Death & Magdarr series.  Someone kn gamebase64 uploaded a c64 version of DOD which I thought didn't exist.  I've tried the vic-20 version and it was difficult to get my bearings since it looked so odd.

 

I like to see new itchio games as they come out as demos and play them.  Mostly, i garden now.

 

cheers.

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