It was 1989 and the Atari ST series of home computers were selling very well in Australia (also the UK) and I was having a great time learning to program the ST (1040 STFM) using STOS.
For a little history, I was working at Pactronics (The User-Friendly Company) as Area Manager for NSW, Australia. Pactronics was one of the largest distributors for software for the booming home computer market with games and applications for Amstrad CPC, PCW, Commodore 64/128, Atari ST, Amiga and the new PC market.
While working at Pactronics I become good friends with a co-worker and huge Amiga fan Neil Miller and we both loved coding, me on 8 bits and Atari and Neil on the Amiga.
During a late afternoon conversation, Neil mentioned that he wanted to write a Text/Graphic adventure for the Amiga or Atari. These types of adventures were very popular at the time and Pactronics having a very good relationship with Atari Australia Pty Ltd he thought there would be a great opportunity to get them on board.
Neil knew that I had written a few tex adventures and had them published but these had been old-school verb/noun but he really wanted to have a multi-word parser. You should have seen the look on his face when I mentioned that I had already developed such a parser back in 1986 for the Kaypro (using SBASIC).
Kaypro II – CPM + SBASIC
Skip forward a month or so and we decided that on a game title (or series of titles) called the Ryan Rookaby Adventures, with title number one to be called “The South American Adventure”.
I converted the original Kaypro multi-word parser over to STOS, fully debugged while Neil worked on the storyline, puzzles etc… and then we set about coding the adventure and before long it started taking shape and by mid-1990 it was looking pretty good. but things quickly came to an end.
Firstly I left Pactronics for another company and grew tried of the Atari ST as AMOS for the Amiga had been released and to be honest, looked far more promising than the Atari market which began to slow down. With support for a text/graphic adventure for the Atari looking less likely to get the green light for production we called it quits on Ryan Rookaby’s adventures.
Recently I’ve been working through my old coding and game development notes and came across the original STOS coded multi-word parser and game notes for “The South American Adventure”.
I’ve scanned in the source code and will publish it soon for anyone interested. It would be easy to convert to another language or maybe you’d be interested in trying it out in STOS either on a real Atari ST or an emulator.