Adventure by Program Power - 1

"Adventure" is the simple name of a text adventure game that was published back in 1982 by Program Power, who later became Micro Power. The author (according to one of the messages in the game) was J Spilsbury. The instructions on the loading screens state the objective: rescue a beautiful princess from the Magic Caverns, collecting any treasures you find on the way. From some of the game locations and puzzles, it was clearly inspired by the classic Colossal Cave adventure game, which was not uncommon for adventure games back then. I was able to get a certain way in the game, but would invariably end up stuck.

Adventure: introduction and instructions 

Interestingly, there is not a lot of information regarding how to solve this game on the net even now. So I decided to sit down and put in a concerted effort to get to the end of the game, referring to the code as necessary to get to the bottom of it all, the ultimate goal being to make available a solution to the game after all these years!

Versions of the game were produced for the Electron, the BBC Micro and even the Acorn Atom. The Electron version is identical in content to the BBC version except that it runs in MODE 6 (white text with a blue "Venetian blind" effect) as compared to the BBC version which uses colour to a limited extent in teletext MODE 7.

Electron version: "Venetian blind" effect

BBC version: easier-to-read Teletext display

Disk image of Adventure for BeebEm

A disk image of Adventure (BBC version) for running with BeebEm  can be downloaded from
my post on this page of the Stardot forums. This is a patched version I have made (see later posts) which improves the text display and adds logic to recognize a successful end of game.

Other websites contains disk images for the Electron & BBC versions, but only the Electron version works if running from disk under an emulator - the BBC version fails to run as it is trying to loads data into an area of memory which is reserved for the disk filing system - presumably it assumes the machine is loading from tape. The version linked above has been patched so that it loads properly.