I'm so pleased I managed to finished porting Colossal Adventure over to Adventuron. Advent (or Adventure 1 or Classic Adventure, or Colossal Adventure, depending on your preference) was one of the first games I played on my ZX Spectrum. My mum and I made two giant mugs of tea every Saturday morning and sat together mapping out the cave, working our way through the puzzles and trying to get to the end of the game.

We managed to get quite far through it, together. She would do the mapping, while I would type in the commands. Whenever we got stuck, we'd save our progress to tape, which involved getting a fresh Boots C15 tape, marking the counter on the tape recorder onto the label of the tape, and then saving our game. Then we'd rewind the tape, listen for the start of the data block noise, rewind it a tinge, take the tape out and leave it next to the game tape, ready for the next session. We'd then turn everything off and go downstairs to make lunch or go out and do some gardening.

For weeks, every weekend, we worked our way through the game. We climbed the plant in the twopit room, crossed the troll bridge, and explored every exit from Bedquilt multiple times, reloading each time our lamp went out. My mum grew to hate "That bloody pirate", as she eventually called him, because despite our best efforts, we only managed to find his chest once or twice, and never mapped out the maze!

By my reckoning we got about 3/4 of the way to a solution before we eventually gave up. I think it was either the Plover room or the troll puzzle which did for us in the end. But for the last 30 years I've always wished I could finish Colossal Adventure. And so, in 2021, I set about not only to finish it, but to use the playthrough to rewrite the game in Adventuron.

Strictly, you're not allowed to do stuff like that in Adventuron, the EULA says you shouldn's re-use copyrighted works, but Colossal Adventure is a clone of a clone of a clone itself. Plus nobody's made a penny from it in quarter of a century, so I don't expect any lawyers to come beat down my door looking for the £0.00 in royalties they might percieve to have lost! :)

So, what I wanted to do was to make a PERFECT recreation of the game in Adventuron, which turned out to be pretty tricky since Level 9 did some funky tricks, including their maze implementation which I had to fully decipher before I could remake it.

But, after a week of painstaking work, mapping and re-mapping areas, learning the algorithms (which I tweeted about), I managed to make as close a port of the spectrum game as I could... In so doing, I finally finished the game as well, which, if my mum is up there somewhere, I have to hope gave her a smile that I managed it in the end :)

http://darkbluemonkey.com/games/colossal%20adventure