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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 11:47 am
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Hey Chris, if SaxonPike's solution doesn't pan out I would be happy to lend a hand in gathering data from the ROL adventure the good old fashioned way... by playing it! I usually takes notes and draw maps out on graph paper when I am on an adventure so it will not be too difficult, I just need to save the game at different points and try different things each time.

Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 2:45 pm
by rld
There's an interesting playthrough of ACS Rivers of Light on Youtube also. Just search for "IPAT rivers of light" on youtube.

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 6:28 pm
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Cool thanks rld, checkin it out now. Game playthroughs are one of my favorite things to search for on youTube.

EDIT: He chose to be fire in graphic tile and in name - lol!

So grateful "Un" chose to go with the Amiga port for his IPAT ["I played a thing"] play through video. The graphics are oh so much bettah! I already have the complete Amiga ACS graphic tiles set by the way if anyone wants them.

I like his narration too, the way he goes in and out of his theatrical voice which is totally overacted in a B-movie sort of way which reminds me a little of the Deathstalker series [DSII being the best for it's humor] of films.

Ah, the honey-comb cereal commercial jingle... lol! I love that cereal!

Hey, this 'Un' guy is a prime candidate for initiation into the wondrous mysteries and magic of ACK!

In part 3: He says "Use keys to open doors." He sounded almost just like the mysterious disembodied voice from the classic 80's arcade game Gauntlet, lol. Plenty of 80's references in this series folks, if your paying attention. BTW: This series has 10 parts to it! This guy has a number of other similar game play through series as well. Quite the prolific youtube videomentary man.

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 8:04 pm
by Garth's Equipment Shop
That last post was getting a lil long due to excessive append edits so I'd better stick this one in a new post.

I was checking out 'Un's youtube profile to learn more about him and his other prjects and thought the info he provided there was worth repeating here:
Hey, folks, I'm Un! I do what are effectively video Let's Plays: longplays of video games with commentary. I started out using the name "I Played a Thing" due to my perception of LPs as an SA-specific phenomenon; I continue to use it because, well, I like it. But yeah, these are pretty much LPs. Enjoy...?
Oh, and higher-quality versions are also downloadable at http://www.skunkfooqua.com/ipat
Image

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 8:49 pm
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Below the Root looks and sounds like a very interesting piece of gaming history. Its from 1984 and it picks up where a series of utopian/dystopian books leaves off and is co-produced by the author of the books [Green Sky trilogy]. Very unique RPG in it's own right and pretty impressive animation and collision detection for it's time. While not very impressive graphically I think the artist did some pretty nice work [within the limitations of the time] on some of the scenery creating almost celtic knotwork style vine work for the tree house/villages.

Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 8:51 am
by rld
Garth's Equipment Shop wrote: So grateful "Un" chose to go with the Amiga port for his IPAT ["I played a thing"] play through video. The graphics are oh so much bettah! I already have the complete Amiga ACS graphic tiles set by the way if anyone wants them.
I would be interested in seeing the ACS tiles - can you post a link to them in this thread?

What size are they - would we be able to directly import them to ACK?

Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 10:12 pm
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Sorry for the delay. I didn't have them altogether in convenient ready to import files just then. But I've whipped some up just for you!

Check em out here.

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2009 7:19 am
by rld
That is awesome, thanks.

Those tiles look much better than the ACS graphics I remember - of course, I had the 4-color IBM PC version.

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 7:12 am
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Chris H wrote:
SaxxonPike wrote:I've been trying to break open the internals of the ACS adventure file format. ...
Hey SaxxonPike, I don't know if you're still lurking here, but have you made any progress with this? I'm thinking about trying to port the ACS game "Rivers of Light" to ACK, and being able to see exports of the data would of course help greatly. :)
Hope you are still interested in making this port Chris. I have taken up this request myself since SaxxonPike seems to be busy with other stuff.

All I did was run the Amiga ACS rom in WinUAE the emulator for Amiga games and chose construct adventure with the Rivers of Light game disk loaded instead of one of the other kits. Then I simply went in to the various editors and was able to see everything needed to recreate it in all its lovely detail in ACK. I took many screenshots for you too. I also took the liberty of importing all the Amiga ACS graphics and recreating the ROL worldmap in ACK. See the Rivers of Light WIP thread.

Hope it inspires you to go ahead with your port! It would be a cool addition to the sample games included with ACK. But I would also enjoy playing an original parody of it as you are so good at that. ;)
rld wrote:That is awesome, thanks.

Those tiles look much better than the ACS graphics I remember - of course, I had the 4-color IBM PC version.
No prob!

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 11:55 pm
by McDeath
Is this site still alive? Anyone know if the extra adventure included on the amiga adf emulation disk works. I couldn't make a copy of it. Seems only the default 3 type + Land of Aventuria and Rivers of light would copy to blank adfs. I didn't even see it listed in the menu via mouse or joystick

I'm hoping to send my old adventures to gamebase c64 and get them turneds into disk images for that emulator. They're ok, so don't expect a great production.

Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 1:13 am
by Garth's Equipment Shop
Is what site still alive? Jolt Country? When its just us veterans there isnt a whole lot of chatter as we've pretty much said it all before and so we wait, either for new people to discover ACK and show up here or one of us to step forward and say here it is, i finally finished that game i started a thread about years ago lol.

By extra adventure Im assuming your referring to the space one contributed by Ken St. Andrew called Galactic Agent. Yes it is hidden on the main disk. Though I cant remember exactly how I was able to get to it with only the images and the emulator. If I had to hazard a guess I would say you load the game disk twice, one copy in the slot to run ACS and another copy loaded into another slot and used as the adventure disk.

There is a fan site you can upload your old adventures [as disk images] to, here: http://www.adventureconstructionset.com ... efault.asp

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:33 am
by McDeath
Heh, that's how I got here. Sorry for the long wait. Before in Oregon now in Missouri with internet (eh long story).

I have to figure out who to mail my c64 disks to so they can be converted into emulation. I'm trying to reestablish my contact on gamebase. These aren't stellar adventures just some stuff we made way back.

I'll attempt to get galactic agent to work. I'm not having a lot of luck with the new amiga emulator seems I keep getting sound problems.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:36 pm
by Flack
McDeath wrote:I have to figure out who to mail my c64 disks to so they can be converted into emulation. I'm trying to reestablish my contact on gamebase. These aren't stellar adventures just some stuff we made way back.
I would be glad to do this for you. Send me a PM and I will send you my mailing address. I have both a u1541 and a Zoom Floppy, both of which can convert real disks to d64 disk images.

Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 12:36 pm
by McDeath
Just letting everyone know I finally got the disks sent and thanks to Rob they all were transferred successfully. Sadly, space time warp by my dad is really messed up. Won't even boot. I was hoping it would have straightened out but alas. It was a rather odd adventure of frustration.

Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 1:45 pm
by McDeath
While rummaging through some old 3.5 disks I found out ages ago I copied ACS and made the fantasy set on my old dis machine (now dead). So I popped the disks into my old xp machine (only computer I have save for c64 and a500).

Really odd. I found the older more simple dos games that utilized only inboard gfx and beeps for sounds work fine. I was easily able to make each of the disks for scifi, rivers of light, adventuria, etc. Better yet they work from hard drive as well. Heck I can just click on the individual adventures and the series of f1,3,5,7 menus pop up. They can be edited, saved, and played.

Pity so few submissions for ACS. I did not find a single apple ii submission. I'm making a gfx collection from each version. I need to get my apple ii emulator working.

Funny thing about gfx. C64 is sort of a 16x16 pixel grid by the horizontals are two wide. Odd. The pc is true 16x16 and Amiga is 32x32. I suspect apple ii mimics c64.

I need to make mp3s of the music as well. My Amiga emulator still sounds glitchy. Also need to lift gfx from age of adventure.

COMPLETE ACS COLLECTION

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2018 6:51 pm
by McDeath
Below is a post I have been starting to seed on a few forums or groups (mostly appleII groups). For some reason the ACS big bite me and from thinking about it i have slowly started putting stuff together. The listed adventure construction set site that had the d64 images is gone to a digital parking lot of ads and FOR SALE. The archives has little to nothing. There are a few sites around with images but I figured why the hell don’t I throw all the files I can in an organized way in one spot (probably a zip of sorts on a google drive/Dropbox/etc).

I’m big on thinking back on nostalgia games and I’d like to see more brought back to work on the modern platforms. Sure the pacing of these games were slower than today’s speed game demons but I still like them. They don’t age always so well but who cares? So I will post my dilemma below:

——

There are many .dsk images out and I believe I’ve found most of them. Many aren’t labeled all that well but they seem to work. What I am trying to do is remake master copies of each:
RIVERS OF LIGHT
LANDS OF ADVENTURIA
FANTASY ADVENTURE
SCIENCE FICTION ADVRNTURE
SPY/MYSTERY ADVRNTURE.

Of these I believe I have Science fiction and Rivers of life. Icantbesure they are masters esp the sci-fi since it was ran at least once through HAVE ACS FINISH THE ADVRNTURE. The same was true for fantasy except I believe they erased all monsters and items and tried to remake by having ACS finish the adventure. Seems they used sci-fi to finish as that’s an option no matter what graphic set. It’s pretty annoying.

The problem is MAKE AN ADVENTURE DISK or COPY ADVENTURE DISK. When it asks for blank disk or disk to put adventure I keep on getting the error CHECK DISK OR DRIVE. This is virtual using APPLEWIN but I also tried on the online APPLEIIjava. I get the same error.


I’m at a loss on what to do. I’ll try the ciderpress to format a digital blank and try again but I don’t think it’ll be any different. I need some help with this.

I’d be grateful if all the adventures were freshly made and saved as .dsk but I’ll take at minimum spy, fantasy, and esp lands of Adventuria.

Why?

Well I’m putting together a Stuart smith package of Fracas, Age of heroes (and the individual Heracles + Ali baba) and all versions of ACS (dos, c64, Apple II, Amiga). There were some more adventures submitted to c64 recently, my dad and I had some turned to d64 images, I managed to get the dos disks made, and I made all the Amiga via emulator including the extra Agent module (escapes my memory atm).

It’s pure nostalgia and I just want to put something together in one big download including manuals and images and even a spreadsheet. It’s a mess atm. I even have tilesets done for all except the appleII.

Maybe no one is interested but I can try to keep this alive. On moonlit nights the cold blue light along with some classical music from my MP3 player inspires me to try.

Here’s hoping someone can help.

Re: Adventure Construction Set

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 7:38 am
by Flack
I think I was the one who converted your original C64 floppies to D64 images. I now have the ability to do Apple II and PC floppies too, in case you run across any that you need converted.

Re: Adventure Construction Set

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 7:39 am
by Flack
I should have scrolled up before posting that response -- holy time warp, Batman! Either way, the offer still stands if you run across any others.

Re: Adventure Construction Set

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 8:56 am
by McDeath
I hope someone has Apple II acs and fresh created disks of each set to take up that offer.

A few peeps on a google group confirmed that there’s an error on all the current acs appleII .dsk program disks.

Seems I need to do some fixing of my dos versions as well. I can definitely see why ACK came into being later. There are issues with ACS that is annoying like not being able to delete individual monsters or things (and the flat 127 things limit).

Music? Well, I still believe c64 shines here even over Amiga. Gfx on apple is a tad weird when I was altering a few pics to match the other versions.

Re: COMPLETE ACS COLLECTION

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2018 10:23 am
by Billy Mays
McDeath wrote: Wed Oct 24, 2018 6:51 pmMaybe no one is interested but I can try to keep this alive.
Don't ever doubt yourself, sometimes you do something that at the time you don't realize how important it actually is.