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Adventure games

I liked text-based adventure games a lot when I was younger (I guess I do not have as much patience with them now) and wanted to learn how to write my own. I read a number of articles in various computer magazines about how to make your own and tried it for a bit, and then I got hold of the book ”Äventyrsspel VIC-64” by Mike Grace, originally ”Commodore 64 adventures” that contained not only a good walk-through of how to design a game, but also a listing of the game Nightmare Planet, with a detailed description of the entire game listing.

The game is included in the book as a BASIC listing, which I of course entered, but no matter how many times I checked and double-checked I never got it to work. I am not sure whether the listing in the Swedish edition actually works as written, so I never got to play the game through.

When I later (around the turn of the millennium) started to get in contact with Commodore enthusiasts on the internet I found the English version of the game on a disk image I downloaded from somewhere. So what I did then was to translate it, with texts from the Swedish book, so that I could play it through.

I had forgotten all of this until recently when I in the autumn of 2025 brought my old computers out and started getting them working again. I have added a routine for adding Swedish characters (but not a Swedish keyboard) since I believe this was after my C128DCR, the only Commodore I had at that time with a Swedish keyboard, malfunctioned completely. Now in 2025 I updated it to detect whether the computer has a Swedish keyboard or not, since I have managed to revive a Swedish Commodore 64 I inherited, so that it starts faster when run on a Swedish computer.

I am not republishing the book here (maybe it already exists in a scanned version somewhere? please send me a link if that is the case), but if there is anyone else who did not manage to get the Swedish version to start you can download the program from this page. The English original is available for reading at the Internet Archive.

The disk image contains two files, the English original and the Swedish translation.

You can also see the listing as a text file, which can be run through bastext to convert to a runnable binary.

$Date: 2025-12-30 23:17:02 $ | peter@softwolves.pp.se

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