Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

One of the earliest and most memorable computer games I played as a kid was "King's Quest II", for the Apple IIe. It was pretty hard, and I only managed to get about 1/3 through it, because there was a bridge in the game that would collapse, sending my character plummeting into a canyon. I never figured out that the bridge could only be crossed a set number of times before it would always collapse, and the saved game I was playing only had one crossing left.

So I remained stumped, until I got a "hint book" as a Christmas present. The book was full of questions with empty boxes beneath them, and you could run a special pen over the boxes, causing the answers to slowly fade into view before your eyes. I revealed the answer to "Why does the bridge keep collapsing?" and slapped my forehead, then started the game from the beginning, carefully counting the times I crossed.

Later that day I finished the game. All the rest of the puzzles were easy, and I barely needed the hint book, but I used the marker to reveal all the answers anyway. From those I realized there were multiple way to solve some of the puzzles, which added a few more hours to the fun.

Over dinner that night I said "Let's get King's Quest III!"

My father smiled and said "Well, the last one cost 40 dollars, but eight months of entertainment for 40 dollars is a pretty good deal, so we'll see."

I played and enjoyed King's Quest III, and then King's Quest IV, but that was the last sequel that would run on Apple computers. Then I left for college, and everyone was playing console games and getting well into 3D graphics. King's Quest V, VI, and VII came and went, but I was distracted by multiplayer games and girls.

When King's Quest VIII appeared, I only got vague news of it from gaming magazines and the early internet. I read that it was a massive departure in tone and technology from the earlier games, and that disoriented all the people playing and reviewing it. I assumed it wasn't very good, and wouldn't sell.

Fast forward 25 years...

Apparently the game found an audience, and once a patch was released to fix the glitches in it, reviews and ratings went up. It's true that it was weird, and very unlike the rest of the series, and suffered greatly by being too ambitious for the scrappy state of 3D graphics technology at the time. To be honest, in terms of both visuals and motion, it looks ugly now, even while 2D games from years earlier still look completely acceptable to the modern gaming eye.

For a fun comparison, check out this bundle on the "Good Old Games" retro gaming site. They're selling Kings Quest VII and King's Quest VIII in one package, and they show screenshots from each side-by-side. Flip though and you'll see nice-ugly-nice-ugly-nice-ugly-nice-ugly...

Still, I got curious, and discovered a few video walkthroughs of the game. While watching those I noticed that the background music was eerily compelling, and had a sudden need to hear it in more detail. There were mp3 versions of some of the musical cues sitting around online, but I wanted higher quality. So I went to the source: The Internet Archive copy of the original King's Quest VIII CD-ROM.

I downloaded that, mounted the disc in an emulated copy of Windows XP, and went trolling around. Turns out there are hundreds of files just sitting there on the CD:

But what is this ".AUD" format? Well, long story short, I tried a bunch of different utilities in both Windows and Mac, and eventually did this:

1. Copy all the .AUD files into a folder on the Mac
2. Install ffmpeg via homebrew
3. Go to the folder via Terminal, and run for i in *.AUD; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.WAV"; done

That gave me a long list of uncompressed audio files to work with, and I went poking through them, and gathered the longest ones into an hour-long collection, converted to Apple Lossless format with proper tags.

Here, have an hour-long compilation of music from King's Quest: Mask of Eternity.

And then I discovered something else. There are some voicover outtakes scattered into the rest of the audio.

"There is a curious slot in this pedestal. Something must fit here. Let me try... this. Zip... Ugh... Ow... No, doesn't work."

And so on. In all their horrible glory, here they are. Another amusing detail is that in addition to the usual walkthroughs, you can find complete transcripts of the game made by automated software trawling through the data files, and the outtakes are right there in the transcripts. Surely someone else has noticed these in nearly 30 years? Good grief, I hope so.

Anway, I recommend the music. To me it sounds like a companion ambient album to the soundtrack of the film Labyrinth. (Another favorite of mine.)

As a sort of last hurrah before my work schedule gets intense again, I played my way through Tangled Tales, an RPG from the 80's that I'd never checked out before. It was developed simultaneously for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and MS-DOS computers, but I chose the Apple II version to indulge my ancient obsession with the fuzzy six-color graphics of that machine.

Tangled Tales delivers on that front: The art is adorable. I followed a walkthrough, and along the way I meticulously collected all the animated character portraits and place drawings, which I integrated with a revised walkthrough and posted here. Why? Because that's the sort of thing you do when you're obsessed, that's why!!

I've done this sort of thing before, so I won't repost the walkthrough here, but I will mention a detour I had to make while playing the game:

There's a side-quest where the player encounters Medusa in a dungeon, and if they've collected a mirror from the beginning of the game, they can use it to kill her. Well, I saw the mirror but I didn't pick it up, and when I went back to the beginning to find it, the game had glitched and erased it from the map. I really wanted to defeat Medusa though, because maybe she would drop some fantastic treasure! So what could I do?

Hack the game, obviously.

Usually, I would hack a saved game. That is, I would save my game in the emulator so my progress gets written to a virtual disk file, shut down the emulator, and then open up the disk file in a hex editor and go looking around. But in this case, I was dealing with disk files that were much more sophisticated representations of the media that Tangled Tales was originally sold on, because using anything less would render the game inoperable. These disk files were big chunks of magnetic signal data, like a wicked version of morse code.

The interior of a 5.25-inch floppy disk, like the kind Tangled Tales used, is a round shape that's made to spin, much like a vinyl record but about 1/5 the size. It's made of thin flexible plastic and coated with magnetic particles. The graphic below shows the data on side 1, disk 1 of the original Tangled Tales media. The dark areas are the equivalent of positive magnetic charge, and the light areas are negative magnetic charge. So, if you could look at a disk and "see" magnetic charge like it was a color, you would see something like this.

The virtual disk files I'm using to run Tangled Tales in the emulator are essentially this. Just a huge collection of wiggly variations between positive and negative charge, drawn in the shape of a disk.

Instead of looking at letters and numbers of a message, I was looking at the equivalent of dots and dashes used to transmit the message, with complicated variations in the signal thrown in to make eavesdropping harder. On the original media, those signal variations made the disks harder to copy by conventional means, and formed the front line of the war against software piracy.

Unfortunately for me, searching through data represented this way, and making meaningful changes, would be very hard. I mean, I'm good at what I do and could probably find a way eventually, but killing Medusa isn't worth that kind of time.

So if the virtual disks are off limits, what do I have to work with? The contents of the virtual computer's memory. Luckily, openEmulator lets you flash-freeze the state of the computer to a series of files, and it doesn't do anything tricky like compress or encrypt them. Somewhere in those files is the current state of my adventure. I could edit the data there, then reload the emulator with the changes I want.

Tangled Tales tried to defy me by using awkward formats for their character names and stats, but with a little trial and error in the hex editor, I found what I needed:

I started a new game, saved a copy of the emulator state, then picked up the mirror in my room and saved another copy of the state. By comparing the two, I found one change in the data that looked clean enough to represent an item being added to my character's inventory. Exploring around in that area of memory, I found the rest of my character's stats. So of course I maxed them out...

Thusly equipped with a hand mirror by divine intervention, I defeated medusa.

My reward: Nothing. Not even any gold. Hah!!

Well, I had a good time anyway.

Actually I had a dream like this recently. I'm pretty sure it's because I've been applying for jobs. It's like the adult software engineer version of "that school dream" we're all familiar with.

You know the one: You're wandering the halls, naked, looking for a classroom where a final exam is already halfway done, and when you find it and sit down the whole document is made of gibberish and diagrams you can't fathom...

In this version, I'm sitting at a desk, which is placed in the middle of a living room, and my family members are all crowded into the room talking and eating and playing music, so I can't concentrate at all. There's a big box next to the desk full of computer gear, sent to me by a prospective employer, and I've set some of the equipment up on the desk and am trying to complete a coding challenge.

The hardware is unfamiliar, and operating system is glitchy, all the keyboard shortcuts are different, and the sample code in the editor is in a language that looks like a cross between two other languages, which makes interpreting it almost impossible. Somewhere in the layers of buttons and tabs is a document explaining what the coding task actually is, but I can't find it, no matter how much I click around, and in the background is a voice, trying to get my attention and ask if I need more time, because the interviewer is connected to the machine remotely and can see every fumbling move I make on the machine in real-time.

The box by the desk has other stuff in it too. Filing boxes, wire baskets full of paper, and a whole lot of ragged-looking clothes. It looks like a box you'd see at an estate sale. It looks suspiciously like the posessions of another developer -- one they hastily fired and frog-marched out of the building, before sweeping all of their stuff into a box and mailing it directly to me.

Or, you know, maybe the developer is dead, and this is my inheritance. If I'm hired, I'm supposed to set the rest of this stuff up, and put on the old developer's clothes.

... And thus, the curse is transferred to me.

You ever have a job like that?

Courtesy of Dall-E, here's an example of one of the diagrams from my nightmare coding challenge:

I never played this game as a kid. It sailed right past my ragtag software pirate crew in the 80's. Thanks to fancy emulator technology I can play it now. That's cool, but so what? One word: Deranged.

This version of The Hobbit is full of deranged characters and nonsense, like one of my favorite childhood books, "Alice In Wonderland." Many adventure games from the 80's were this way, mostly because the computing limitations of the time forced games to exist with one foot in the world of crude Turing machines and robotic behavior, and the other foot in the literary world -- since text is much cheaper to work with than graphics or sound. And when you use text to convey what's going on, you have a lot of creative freedom, including the freedom to massively overreach.

And that is what this game does. I played through it last night and it was another trip through the looking glass, into a world where nature, human behavior, and even basic laws of physics have been twisted into taffy.

The rest of this text is adapted from a strategy guide for The Hobbit by Jared Davis, since it provided a great framework to describe the insanity I found:

The Hobbit is a text adventure, so you interact with it by typing things like "ATTACK GOBLIN" and "EAT FOOD". The graphics are a sweet bonus but they're quite static. You can type "OPEN DOOR" and the game will tell you "THE DOOR OPENS", but the door in the picture will not move. Oh well, it's 1982, so we'll take whatever we can get.

Unlike other text games from this era, The Hobbit has a real-time element. So if you don't type anything for a while, the console will tell you "TIME PASSES" and things will happen anyway. Adding to the instability, your companions in the game can wander around on their own, and if you stand in one place they will often get impatient and leave. Two of these NPCs (non-playable characters) are ostensibly on your side: Thorin the dwarf, and Gandalf the Wizard.

The NPCs may fight and do other functions for you. You may ask them to do something and they might comply, remain silent, or even say "No" when you're about to be killed. They are inscrutable. In one game I played, Gandalf had an odd habit of picking up dead bodies and carrying them around.

Right at the start, Gandalf hands you a map, which you need to take to Elrond. Along the way Gandalf may snatch it back from you without warning, then wander off and drop it somewhere. This can be quite vexing since you need it to reach the Misty Mountains.

Did you notice that chest in the picture of Bilbo's home? That's where you put the treasure you steal from Smaug, and doing so ends the game. You can open the chest, close it, and get inside it as well, with or without Thorin. Getting inside it and closing it isn't recommended though, since you'll be trapped for eternity.

A creature called a Warg roams the game, and can show up virtually anywhere. It may also be killed before you encounter it, possibly by Elrond, a troll, Gandalf, or a Goblin. It is also possible that it will kill someone you'll need on your quest, so hope you find it before it finds them.

There is also a Wood Elf in the game, who usually hangs out in Mirkwood, though he can wander from his post. If he finds you he will likely throw you into the Elf King's dungeon. Depending on where you both are, this can actually be a shortcut.

When you're not around, the Warg can sometimes bump into the Wood Elf. They may fight, or the Wood Elf may throw the Warg into the dungeon. In that case, if you get thrown into the dungeon, the Warg may attack you there, or you may arrive in the dungeon to find a dead prison guard (and no Warg.)

In the Misty Mountains there are many goblins. They may fight you, but will more likely throw you in their dungeon. You can escape from the dungeon by climbing out a high window, but being a hobbit, you're not tall enough to do it yourself. You must wait for Thorin to get thrown into the dungeon alongside you, then "SAY TO THORIN 'CARRY ME, OPEN WINDOW, GO WEST'". If Thorin is feeling cooperative, he will then pick you up and haul you out the window with him.

There is also another way to escape: In some games, the goblins wander away from the Misty Mountains and will capture the Wood Elf. Then if they capture you, you will get thrown into the goblins' dungeon, and a few moments later the Wood Elf will throw you into the Elf King's dungeon. Problem solved!

When you get to Lake-town, you need to recruit Bard to kill Smaug the Dragon. He might follow you, but if he doesn't you can pick him up and carry him. He has one arrow, but in order to fire it he must remove it from his quiver first, which he may not do. It's best to take the quiver from him as soon as you meet, then hand him back the arrow. Once you encounter Smaug you will actually have to tell Bard to shoot him, or he will just stand there and get roasted, turning into "DEAD BARD."

If Bard isn't around, you still have a chance to win the game. You can try to fight Smaug yourself, using your sword, the bow and arrow, or any other object in the game, for example you can wield "ROPE" or "DEAD GOLLUM" and then "VICIOUSLY ATTACK SMAUG," which has a success rate far, far higher than you'd expect.

If you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can also ask someone else to fight Smaug. For example, you can stand just outside the cave where the dragon waits, then "SAY TO GANDALF 'GO NORTH, KILL DRAGON, GO SOUTH'." If Gandalf doesn't come back, the dragon killed him. If he comes back, it's possible he tried to kill the dragon but failed. So "SAY TO GANDALF 'GO NORTH, KILL DRAGON, GO SOUTH'" again. This time, if he comes back, the dragon is dead. No one goes two rounds with Smaug without someone getting killed. If he doesn't come back, either he's stuck in the cave looking confused since there's no dragon to fight, or he's charcoal. Still, the odds are better than fighting Smaug yourself, right? And at this point, since you're already at the Misty Mountains, Gandalf is quite expendable. Heh heh heh...

Not a very hobbity way of thinking? Well that's quite appropriate in a world made of deranged nonsense.

You know, less than a year from now we're going to see the first adventure games with NPCs built on "large language model" technology. And just like any other time when artists are working on a fronteir with new material, there will be glorious overreach. The lunacy you'll find in games from 2024 will look just like this game from 1982.