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Did you have to design it all in capital letters on the Spectrum?
On the Dragon that was all there was.

Now personally I am not bothered even a tiny bit by all capital letters,  I like them. I bet the Daleks like them.

But other people back then and especially now seem to have a pathalogical hatred of capital letters.

Have you ever mentioned writing the programs to anyone else in real life since.  I mentioned it at work once and the response was "no you never" and they didn't believe me.
We did have upper/lower case on the Spectrum, but it was muddly because there were several keyboard modes. I can't even remember properly now, but to get some keys requried you to press something like capslock-symbol shift-control. Then wait a moment for the cursor to change to a flashy thing (an E I think) and then press the requred key. Pressing any shift keys was a risky business :lol

The keyboard had a huge drawback in that it was tiny, flat and the merest touch counted as a keypress.

The keyboard also had a huge advantage in that it was tiny, flat and the merest touch counted as a keypress.  :lol You could lay your hands over the keys (practically covering them all) and touchtype without hardly appearing to move.

It has come up before about writing stuff, but most people are not interested unless it's a 3D shoot-em-up with real blood. "oh an adventure game? I thought you meant a real one" kinda thing. At least yours had invaders in it.

It doesn't matter though because we know we were in there at the start of it all don't we. Back when computers were real computers and programmers were real programmers and small furry creatures from... well you get the idea :)
This all takes me back, when me and my mates were about 8 or 9 we learnt just enough BASIC to write very short, linear, graphicless text adventures. They were all based in our neighbourhood and you had to work out how to get from one place to another without running into "Doddy", the woman from church my mum always used to moan about when we were younger. I think the whole Doddy series lasted a good 5 or 6 games, peaking with the frankly amazing Doddy III :)

Have just worked out how to play Spectrum games on my Nintendo DS, will try this one out (the good one that Pani made, not Doddy) :)
My first microcomputer preceded the Spectrum, and even the ZX80. It was a Nascom 2 which used a 4mhz Z80 cpu. There was a major drawback with it - you had to build it yourself. You got a motherboard and a load of components and soldered them together, about 3,000 soldered joints I seem to remember. There was a lesser problem - the 1k static ram chips were late which meant that they weren't available to put 8k ram on the motherboard. Nascom got over this by giving away a 16k dynamic ram board, meaning an additional 1,500 soldered joints. I had one dry joint on a link, which I thought was quite good considering I was a bit of a novice.
I lived with my parents at the time, and my mother was a bit of a fruit machine addict. So I wrote a fruit machine program in basic. I got a hi-res programmable character set board and programmed into it all the fruits, plus half positions to smooth the flow of the reels.
When I'd finished it, I invited Mum to try it out, and went off down the pub. I set the payout to something close to 100%
I got back a couple of hours later and she was still playing it.  :)
Xoco, Yeah, give it a go if you can get it working. I'm afraid it will seem  pretty crude by today's standards, but back then it was an achievement if it ran at all. :)

Eccles, 4,500 soldered joints! and only one bad one. I think if it had been me the result would have been the other way around  :lol

Love the idea of the fruit machine paying out all night. I'd have been still on it too. My kind of game!.

I'd heard about build it yourself kits, but I knew I didn't have the skill or the patience for that.
I would have given up well before one thousand never mind four.

And why can't I KILL ZOD in that game. He is very annoying.
I have done a birthday picture for pani.

It is of a Dalek exterminating Zod.
Thank you, Furby. :) :wave

He IS annoying isn't he. If I still had the source I'd redo it so he dies horribly at the start (or possibly every few minutes)

Zod goes east,
Zod appears from the east,
Zod falls into a bear trap full of angry bears and is ripped to shreds.  :devil
Does he have a useful purpose later on to help in the quest.

I found the "Zod says it is time we were moving on" annoying because I thought "Yes Thank you Zod, I figured that one out already , what do you think I am trying to do here" etc

and he took the sword off me as it was heavy and then I got killed by the dragon so I blame Zod.
took the sword off me as it was heavy and then I got killed by the dragon


Actually now I think about it that is one of his purposes.  :lol I'd completely forgotten about that. I'll have to put it on myself to jog my memory. Let's say that he is more annoying than useful, but does draw your attention to one or two things later on.
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