Pyramid 2000
''Pyramid 2000'' is an interactive fiction game. The game is an altered version of '' Colossal Cave'' that takes advantage of an Egyptian setting, re-theming some of the locations, objects, and puzzles. For instance, the "little bird" from Adventure is now a "bird statue" and the "clam" is a "sarcophagus." Development The system was written by Robert Arnstein using a custom p-code machine with 32 instructions. Unlike the Infocom z-machine, this machine was specific to this game (e.g., command 13 asserted the player was carrying the emerald and only the emerald). Reception It was panned by ''80 Micro'': "This game is yet another example of Radio Shack RadioShack, formerly RadioShack Corporation, is an American retailer founded in 1921. At its peak in 1999, RadioShack operated over 8,000 worldwide stores named RadioShack or Tandy Electronics in the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Austra ...'s inability to deal with the consumer in a consumer's market... ''Pyramid'' suffer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Radio Shack
RadioShack, formerly RadioShack Corporation, is an American retailer founded in 1921. At its peak in 1999, RadioShack operated over 8,000 worldwide stores named RadioShack or Tandy Electronics in the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Outside of those territories, the company licensed other companies to use the RadioShack brand name in parts of Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In February 2015, RadioShack Corporation filed for Chapter 11 protection under United States bankruptcy law after 11 consecutive quarterly losses. By then, it was operating only in the United States and Latin America. In May 2015, General Wireless Inc., an affiliate of Standard General, bought the company's assets, including the RadioShack brand name and related intellectual property, for US$26.2 million. General Wireless Operations Inc. was formed to operate the RadioShack stores, and General Wireless IP Holdings LLC was formed to hold the intellectual prop ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Single-player Video Game
A single-player video game is a video game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. A single-player game is usually a game that can only be played by one person, while "single-player mode" is usually a game mode designed to be played by a single player, though the game also contains multi-player modes. Most modern console games and arcade games are designed so that they can be played by a single player; although many of these games have modes that allow two or more players to play (not necessarily simultaneously), very few actually require more than one player for the game to be played. The ''Unreal Tournament'' series is one example of such. History The earliest video games, such as ''Tennis for Two'' (1958), ''Spacewar!'' (1962), and ''Pong'' (1972), were symmetrical games designed to be played by two players. Single-player games gained popularity only after this, with early titles such as ''Speed Race'' (1974) and ''Space Invade ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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TRS-80 Model I
The TRS-80 Micro Computer System (TRS-80, later renamed the Model I to distinguish it from successors) is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of ''Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 icroprocessor'. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers. The TRS-80 has a full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, the Zilog Z80 processor, 4 KB dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) standard memory, small size and desk area, floating-point Level I BASIC language interpreter in read-only memory (ROM), 64-character per line video monitor, and a starting price of US$600 (equivalent to US$ in ). A cassette tape drive for program storage was included in the original package. While the software environment was stable, the cassette load/save process combined with keyboard bounce issues and a troublesome Expansion Interface contributed to the Model I's reputation as not well-suited to serious ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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TRS-80 Color Computer
The RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer, later marketed as the Tandy Color Computer and sometimes nicknamed the CoCo, is a line of home computers developed and sold by Tandy Corporation. Despite sharing a name with the earlier TRS-80, the Color Computer is a completely different, incompatible system and a radical departure in design and compatibility with its Motorola 6809E processor rather than the Zilog Z80 earlier models were built around. The Tandy Color Computer line started in 1980 with what is now called the Color Computer 1. It was followed by the Color Computer 2 in 1983, then the Color Computer 3 in 1986. All three models maintain a high level of software and hardware compatibility, with few programs written for an older model being unable to run on the newer ones. The Color Computer 3 was discontinued in 1991. All Color Computer models shipped with Color BASIC, an implementation of Microsoft BASIC, in ROM. Variants of the OS-9 multitasking operating system were availab ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Colossal Cave Adventure
''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake. The original game, written in 1975 and 1976, was based on Crowther's maps and experiences caving in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest cave system in the world; further, it was intended ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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P-code Machine
In computer programming, a p-code machine (portable code machine) is a virtual machine designed to execute ''p-code'' (the assembly language or machine code of a hypothetical central processing unit (CPU)). This term is applied both generically to all such machines (such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and MATLAB precompiled code), and to specific implementations, the most famous being the p-Machine of the Pascal-P system, particularly the UCSD Pascal implementation, among whose developers, the ''p'' in ''p-code'' was construed to mean ''pseudo'' more often than ''portable'', thus ''pseudo-code'' meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine. Although the concept was first implemented circa 1966—as O-code for the Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL) and P code for the language Euler—the ''term'' p-code first appeared in the early 1970s. Two early compilers generating p-code were the Pascal-P compiler in 1973, by Kesav V. Nori, Urs Ammann, Kathleen Jensen, Hans-Heinrich Nä ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''. Infocom was founded on June 22, 1979, by staff and students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and lasted as an independent company until 1986, when it was bought by Activision. Activision shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom ''Zork'' brand. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. Overview Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted. Generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, and enters another short serie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7, or .z8, where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run, as given by the first byte of the story file. This is a modern convention, however. Infocom itself used extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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80 Micro
''80 Micro'' was a computer magazine, published between 1980 and 1988, that featured program listings, products and reviews for the TRS-80. History Wayne Green, the creator of many magazines such as '' 73'', founded ''80 Microcomputing'' as a spinoff of his ''Kilobaud Microcomputing'' solely for Tandy Corporation's Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I microcomputer. Like his other magazines it encouraged readers to submit articles and reviews. A 1980 advertisement for the magazine promised that it would "tell you the truth … the good things about the TRS-80 and the not so good" because "Wayne Green has never been one to mince words". By 1982 ''80 Micro'' was the third largest magazine in terms of obtaining advertising, selling 152,000 issues; only ''Vogue'' and ''BYTE'' were larger. Renamed ''80 Micro'' on issue 30 in June/July 1982, the magazine's November 1982 issue had 518 pages, the most in its history for a regular issue. Green attributed the magazine's success to Radio Shack's po ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Adventure Games
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', ''Monkey Island'', and ''Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands wi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |