Friday, February 03, 2012

Eamon Trivia 01: The Curse of Talon



Progress is going well on Eamon Deluxe 5.0 and I'm close to sending a Beta 3 copy to my testers and hopefully a public release in the near future. Until then I need a few fun distractions to take away from the tediousness that comes with parts of the revision process.

When converting Classic Eamon adventures to Eamon Deluxe, I get to see into every nook and cranny of that adventure and often find things the average player would be likely to miss or never even see at all. This can be due to a number of reasons, including obscure special events, erroneous code or the author's personal Easter eggs to name a few.

Although I haven't kept a list of what I have found over the years (and I wish I had), I usually left notes about anything interesting I found in that particular adventure's hint files. I thought it would be fun to make semi-regular blog entries to share some of these amusing oddities and include some screen shots as well. I'll list the Official Eamon Guild number and the Eamon Deluxe number, followed by the adventure name. So, here we go...


Today's trivia: EAG#SD156/EDX#09-3

THE CURSE OF TALON by Sam Ruby.

There is an unused room in The Curse of Talon called The Butt. I have no idea why it was there and will probably never know but I find it pretty amusing nonetheless. I converted that adventure several years ago and had forgotten about the Butt Room until recently when I was reorganizing The Sam Ruby Adventures for the Eamon Deluxe 5.0 revision. Apparently I found it amusing back when I converted it too because I expanded on it, placing "monsters" from the database that were no longer needed in the Butt Room and leaving an Easter egg that could be used to access it.

To enter the Butt Room in the Apple II version, use Control-C to break the program and enter the command shown in the screen shot. To leave the Butt, use the same method, but change "R2=51" to "R2=R3".

In the Eamon Deluxe version, simply cast your POWER spell to be teleported into the Butt. [snicker] Going in any direction will take you back to the room you came from. (Note: GIVE 5000 to a neutral monster in Eamon Deluxe to turn them into a friend.)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

At least Sam was nice enough to leave the lights on in The Butt Room. :D

Anonymous said...

What what!

Anonymous said...

LOL Nice.

Nathan Segerlind said...

Hi.

I just found this site and tried downloading the Zuchowski archive and emulators, etc.

It turns out that my memory of how to use ProDOS and DOS 3.3 are much decayed. To the point of being useless.

If somebody could post a simple "how to start the emulator and run a game using fresh sam" article, that would be great.

(I tried running edgar's adventure from a fresh same and I crashed the thing.)

Nathan Segerlind said...

Okay, I run the dos 3.3 games fine, but prodos is still troubling me.

Matthew said...

Don't feel bad. I used a II+ growing up so didn't use ProDOS. Maybe someone with more experience with ProDOS can write up a brief primer that I can post?

Frank - Eamon Deluxe said...

Nathan,

Using the .DSK images available on the Eamon CD, this method works for the ProDOS adventures:

Boot the "Bootp8" image, then switch it out to the "Eamon001" image and type:
PREFIX,D1
-STARTUP

It should run pretty much like the DOS 3.3 version after that.

Alternately, you can use a hard drive image I made years ago that is bootable (in AppleWin select the Configuration button, then Disk, then click "Enable hard disk in slot 7" and load it) and has all of the Zuchowski adventures as well as some of your own in an upgraded format. The EAMONFK.HDV file is on the Eamon CD or you can get it here:
http://www.eamonag.org/pages/kunze.htm

Hope that helps,
-Frank

Frank - Eamon Deluxe said...

P.S. I just tried Edgar's Adventures. Boot the Bootp8 image, switch to EDGAR and type:
PREFIX,D1
-EDGAR

Nathan Segerlind said...

Thanks, Frank!

That did the trick.

I am eager to to poke around some of the "newer" Eamons that came out after I lost touch with the community (basically, once I went to college and lost Apple II access).... that would include yours.

Was it ever decided if Leadlight was going to be given a place in the archive with an EAG number and review, etc?

Nathan Segerlind said...

This is more of an emulator question... is there a way to "dump" output from the Apple II emulator into a windows file or buffer?

(like a copy/paste ? or maybe "printing" to a special device?)

Matthew said...

Nathan, I don't know what you're trying to "dump" but if you're wanting to extract text files, I've used "CiderPress" with great success.

Frank - Eamon Deluxe said...

It takes some minor finagling but can be done; you just set the emulator to redirect "printer" output to a text file. I have only used ApplePC for this, but I'm pretty sure the other emulators support it as well.

As Matt said, CiderPress works for plain texts files. If you are looking to extract Eamon databases, I have disk images with programs that will do that. Applesoft BASIC programs have to be listed manually but that is pretty easy too.

Leadlight has yet to receive an official number with the EAG but Wade Clarke has given me the green light to convert it to Eamon Deluxe so it probably should get some sort of number to avoid confusion.

Nathan, you should send me your email address. I have the complete set of your adventures converted to Eamon Deluxe that I recently added v5.0 mods to and updated. I can send you an early release copy if you wish. Contact me at eamondeluxe (at) gmail.com