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BeeBS


The BBS designed for the BBC Micro


                           Updates


Oregon Trail, anyone?


16 March 2024 Updates

Oregon Splash


Over on the Stardot forum Lurkio had ported the original Oregon Trail type
in which can be found here:

Archive.org

Naturally after asking Lurkiob s permission I couldnb t wait to get this
converted to a door game on BeeBS.

Oregon Splash Mode 7


As Oregon Trail is quite a small text based program there were only a few
changes to make:
 1. Display text at either 80 or 40 columns as needed
 2. Add a procedure for text to be displayed with the control codes for
    ANSI/Mode 7 depending on the client
 3. Insert ANSI/ASCII/Mode 7 headers for the Journey progress, Forts,
    Church Yard and Oregon
 4. Character validation and Timeout procedures

When CHAINING to Oregon Trail from BeeBS the users client preferences are
store in the active user file which determines their terminal settings.
For displaying extended text I used a procedure to take a whole statement
and then split this in to either 40 or 80 columns of text.

CodeSnip 1


Next Oregon Trail needed to adapt to using either ANSI or Mode 7 control
codes (or in the case of ASCII none). To avoid re-writing all the prompts
within Oregon Trail I replaced PRINT statements with a procedure that
would insert the correct control codes.

CodeSnip 2


Where c is the colour of the text to be displayed. E.g. PROCc(1,b Hello
Worldb ) would give Hello World in both Mode 7 and ANSI clients.

Adding headers to each stage of the journey was as simple as creating a
file for each day of the journey to display, the same is true for the fort
days. I opted to store the header in ram and send over serial directly
from there (as each file is <1k). Along the bottom of each stage of the
journey is the progress bar from left to right.

Mode7

                              Mode 7 Journey
ANSI Fort

                                ANSI Fort
ASCII Grave

                             ASCII Grave Yard

A save feature was added that records the users current position and
supplies allowing them to return back to BeeBS. When Oregon Trail is
opened again it will check for the existence of the users Save file and
prompt to resume or restart the game.

Finally the last thing to add was message boards along the route at forts
to leave a message for your fellow travelers, a place to store and view
your/other obituaries and a hall of fame for those lucky few to make it to
Oregon!

All in all a fun little project, it needs tidying up a bit as the
formatting of the text is a mess in places. There is a bug from the
original port listing where you have no ammo (despite buying some) however
if you buy more ammo at the next fort your original ammo plus your new
ammo appears. Occasionally Oregon struggles to CHAIN back to BeeBS and
hangs...Ib m not sure of the cause of this and am still looking in to it.

                    Created on my Acorn BBC Master 128
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