Scargill

ADVEN-80 – A system for creating Adventure Games on the PC

After being exposed to the original Crowther adventure on the mainframes of Newcastle University during my time with Newcastle’s first computer "club" in which I was the secretary and wrote the monthly newsletter, I started to take a deep interest in programming. Anyone who has played the original and didn’t find it stunning needs a lobotomy. The very idea that machines might stimulate our imaginations I found instantly irrisistable. Of course one gets sidetracked!! and the first output of my fanatical interest was a FORTH interpreter called SPILL which achieved only nominal recognition however in 1980 I wrote an article on some ideas for using binary trees to develop a simple AI system, allowing the computer to ask the user questions in order to narrow down an answer to a problem. I could see the implications for gaming and wrote the article for the US publication – David H Ahls’ Creative computing. 2 days before Christmas 1980 I received a cheque for $150 dollars from the U.S. publisher and the article "Fantasia" appeared shortly thereafter.

Spurred on by this success, I developed a complete system for creating Crowther-like adventures for the Z80 Microprocessor and was rewarded by the publication of the article, covering many pages, in the then prestigios "Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia. Yes, I’m sure the name was a mick-take and it’s now just called "Dr Jobbs Journal"

Peter D. Scargill : Adven-80, An Advanced Adventure Development System; Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Number 61 (November 1981).

Links to the original article for those interested in the mechanics… are here.

adven-80.arc

Source code for Adven-80 by Peter D. Scargill, plus a sample game by Robert W. Rasch. Requires a Z80-based CP/M system or emulator.

adven80.zip

Source code, manual and sample game for Adven-80, written by Peter D. Scargill. Requires a Z80-based CP/M system or emulator.

The Video Jukebox

As early developments in this sphere were mainly done before the age of the Internet, there is not much information out there.

Around October 1982, our first product "Star Video" hit the market and was featured in most of the trade magazines at the time. At £3,500 the first machine was not cheap and in fact was a bit of a cheat, it used an American educational tape controller put together with some glue logic to handle cash input – and a graphics system I developed using a "Nascom" computer, a Z80-based machine which in it’s time was something special. The machine used only one VHS tape and took ages to find selections. That not-withstanding, we took it all over the place, starting at the world’s fair in Tokyo, my first trip out of the UK, shortly to be followed by many more.

This product led to our very own creation, a Z80 based, twin-VCR system using our own multi-tasking operating system. The product was taken all over the world and of course it was at one demonstration in the US that I met Maureen.

The demise of the jukebox thanks to major Japanese investment in video disks led us to go further afield. "SoftSpeak" was the first widely-available product to allow speech playback on the PC – this led to developments allowing single-chip microprocessors simply to playback speech – one result of this is the award from Arizona Microchip that still sits on my wall, presented on 27th November 1990. After that came a series of home-control products which featured in just about every PC magazine in the western world and at least one in Russia!

Of interest:

I’ve some scans of old invoices/receipts from France and Company back in 1900 and thereabouts you might find interesting.