Reimagining an ASCII Text Adventure

geurillapaint · Post by **geurillapaint** » Tue Feb 07, 2023 11:44 am

Hi, hopefully this is the right place for this.

So there's this text adventure game I'm in love with. Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror, created by David Jewett in 1986 for the Apple II computer, and later remade for more modern (windows 95, IBM, etc) machines. As a kid, I played this game for hours and never managed to complete the game until my teen years. In my 20s I started programming (I'm an engineer now) and developed a love for it. Looking back, I kept thinking about this game and its ASCII map and how fun it would be to remake the game.

I reached out to David and shared my passion. He was surprisingly responsive, and let me know the game was written with Aztec C. I asked if he would be willing to let me have a copy of the game script as I wanted to try to remake the game in Python, to which he declined as he was apparently thinking of releasing the game as a mobile app. In honesty, I think he believed I was going to steal his shareware game and monetize it. I assure you, I don't have any interest in monetizing an ASCII text adventure. I just wanna see if I can make the game for fun.

So I had two options. I could play the whole game and write everything down by hand (boring), or I could try to reverse engineer the game and extract the script.

That part has been challenging. I've tried Ghidra, but it doesn't seem to be able to grab what I'm looking for. I've tried to debug in dosbox, but either I lack the skill, or it isn't possible. My guess is the former.

So I'm wondering if anyone has the knowledge/experience to help me reverse engineer this game and see its innards. Again, I'm doing this for my own fun and nothing more. I just really like to see how things work and wonder if they can also work another way.

Rwolf · Post by **Rwolf** » Tue Feb 07, 2023 12:57 pm

Why reverse engineer someone elses work, if they have other future plans for it?
Better create your own adventure, if that is what you want to do.
Plenty tools for rolling your own, I gather; look at e.g. http://textadventures.co.uk/

geurillapaint · Post by **geurillapaint** » Tue Feb 07, 2023 11:28 pm

Rwolf wrote: ↑ Why reverse engineer someone elses work, if they have other future plans for it?
Better create your own adventure, if that is what you want to do.
Plenty tools for rolling your own, I gather; look at e.g. http://textadventures.co.uk/

To be honest, I'm not interested in making my own adventure. I'm interested in seeing how the game I love, works as well as how it might also work.