Oregon Trail, anyone?

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 couldn'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 stored 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,"Hello World") 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...I'm not sure of the cause of this and am still looking in to it.