Thank you, I appreciate the feedback! It's tough to get legibility in 4x5 pixels.
Christopher Drum
Creator of
Recent community posts
Aha, that was the trick. At that point in the "tutorial" (I was just following along in order as explained by the help screen) I didn't even know there was a "Solution Explorer" (IDE seemed to default to the "Label Explorer"). Right-click revealed that copy-pasting the code from the help defaulted to TASM as the Assembler. "C64Studio" worked as expected, thank you.
Trying to run 7.6 (.NET 6.0) and going through the Help file, error right from the start. The code in "Getting Started - Simple Assembly" won't compile with
Syntax error: BASIC
at line 5
!basic
followed by a warning
Unused label !
I see references in your bug fixes to "basic label" a couple of times, so perhaps related? I'm on Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 19045) , running against GTK3VICE-3.7-win64. I've tried setting the debugger to both "Tiny64 Internal Debugger" and my VICE installation.
Getting interactive fiction onto the Pico-8 has been something of an ongoing discussion amongst the Pico-8 dev community for a while. There have been some interesting projects in this space, including an amazing port of Colossal Cave and (not to brag) my own Status Line interpreter (which allows you to play Zork).
There haven't been too many attempts that I've seen which try to bring full graphic adventures to the Pico-8, so I decided to start at the beginning and dive headfirst into porting Mystery House to the Pico-8. The original Apple 2 (public domain) classic had a lot of limitations that are similar to the Pico-8's limitations, so it seemed like a good exercise in seeing what could be done. The original 140K game has been squeezed down into a 60K cartridge, which includes all text, graphics, **and bugs** from the original (an accurate port is the primary goal here).
A link to the source code is on the itch page, and various notes explain more about the process of getting this to work. I hope to expand the system and tools built for the project into something more generally useful to the fantasy console development community. Some interesting techniques are used to crunch everything down into the Pico-8 limitations, and further blog posts that detail what I discovered during this porting process are in the works.
https://christopherdrum.itch.io/mystery-house
Very nicely done! I enjoyed my time and pushed through to the end.
I did have one bug that almost prevented progress. When I click on the gold star in the inventory, the mouse cursor disappears. Makes it a guessing game where my cursor is as I try to click on something else, anything else, to get the cursor to reappear. I found that exiting full screen and re-entering full screen brings the cursor back (or getting lucky with my cursor and clicking on another inventory item also brings the cursor back).
That's a reasonable request. In fact, I can't remember why I didn't post executables for other platforms before. I guess I didn't think anyone outside of the Pico-8 community would want it, but I'm happy to provide it. I'll have time over the coming weekend to do some builds and alert you when they're posted.
@comchia Hmm... I'm on Windows 10 and just installed Pico-8 0.2.4b. I put in 3 decimal values (1.123, 2.234, 3.345) into cells A1, A2, A3 and in A4 entered @sum(a1..a3) (note: two dots between cell labels, not three)
Next, I put in horizontal entries using very large decimal values: 1.123456789, 2.23456789, 3.3456789486 and ran a summation on those to properly receive 6.7037(etc...)
So far, it is working as expected for me. Could you please provide more detail about the values you entered and the summation formula you attempted?
Look above at the section called "Where do I find z3 games to play?". That contains a link to github (source code AND .z3 files), and a link to another site, where the classics are archived. There are probably more sites than those, now that they've been archived publically. Zork I, II, and III are all there. :)
7! Ah, yeah, I'm sorry I don't have anything set up to test on anything but my personal rig. If I can figure out a nice way to virtualize older Windows versions and do some light testing, I'll try to do so for the future. I appreciate learning of the issue, but I'm not sure I can offer a Windows 7 solution. I'll ask the Pico8 community for advice, just in case.
The puzzle was specifically "which pack of cigarettes should I buy?" It isn't a "brute force" decision.
The description of the machine explains how each tier goes back one year in time.
The advertisements have copyrights to explain their position in the timeline.
One ad in particular alludes to a "pack-in lighter" but it's partially obscured by another advertisement... which can be peeled back to reveal more of the cigarette history.
This is all just to have a light source for under the sink to operate the disposal. Nothing deeper than that.