Add to our list of places where ACK is getting noticed.

Chris H.'s Ultima / ACS-style game development system!

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Garth's Equipment Shop
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Add to our list of places where ACK is getting noticed.

Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

EDIT: Site I was hosting this old list on has not been available for years. Sorry for forgetting to update this. Now the thread will just be linked to in the new stickied ACK PRAISE thread.
Last edited by Garth's Equipment Shop on Sun Jul 14, 2013 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Chris H
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Post by Chris H »

Cool, I wasn't aware of most of these. I became aware of the Atari ACK only recently. Complete coincidence; not only that, but it looks like they beat me to the name, as I don't think I settled on the name ACK until about '89 or '90, where they clearly were using it in '88. I wonder if he too picked the name as a variation on ACS?

There are apparently also a TACK (Text Adventure Creation Kit) and a SHACK (Super Happy Adventure Creation Kit), although I believe both are pretty recent. And we almost had a JACK to add to the mix. There's something about those three letters everyone just loves.

The U4PART2 game is getting occasional mention of its own, as well: in particular, someone posted a screenshot longplay on rpgcodex.net. The guy added his own commentary as well, which was hilarious, I had a great time reading through it.

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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

Check THIS out! I'm gonna load up this baby [Atari ACK] and play it! Then I'm gonna clone everything I see in PC ACK. Why? Because I can! Muahahaha! :twisted:
Which of you is interested in my fine wares?

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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

Working link to download page for Atari800Win Plus
http://atariarea.krap.pl/PLus/index_us.htm

The link at the page in my last post is dead.

And here is the page to download the Atari roms you'll need.
http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.p ... tail&id=10
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Post by Chris H »

Did you find a place to download Atari ACK itself? I have an actual Atari 800 I'd like to fire this up on. :)

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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

If I could read the atari basic file I'd translate the code to gwbasic. Anyway, the Atari emulator runs basic I just haven't managed to figure out how to run a .bas prog from within it. If you can get the .bas file to read in your Atari could you get screen or text grabs of all the lines of code and email it to me? Even just some digital camera shots of the screen will do if they are readable enough to transcribe them.

Adventure Creation Kit

Listing1:CREATION.BAS Download

Listing2:DEMO.ADV Download
GETTING STARTED

Type in Listing 1, CREATION.BAS, check it with TYPO II and SAVE a copy before you RUN it.

If you have trouble typing in the special characters in lines 1130, 1150 and 1480, don't type them in. Listing 2 will create them for you. Type Listing 2, checking it with TYPO II and SAVE a copy to disk. When RUN, Listing 2 creates these hard-to-type lines, and stores them in a disk file called D:LINES.LST. To merge the two programs, LOAD "D:CREATION.BAS" then ENTER "D:LINES.LST" and remember to SAVE the completed program before you RUN it.

When you see the title screen, press the joystick button to bring up the main Creation screen. To play a game, first you must load an adventure map from disk or make up a new map of your own. Owners of this month's Antic disk can start with the full-length sample adventure, DEMO.ADV. Press [P] to start playing. Press the [ESC] key any time you want to exit the game.
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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

BTW Chris I read through that entire screen by screen walkthru for Ultima4p2. It kicked total ass.

The combination of your in game humor and the player's equally hilarious commentary made for the most entertaining forum read I have ever experienced.

I can't imagine a better form of praise to you the game designer. I can only hope that some day one of my games will achieve that kind of acclaim.

You did an incredible job on that game. I noticed you made a list of things at the end that the reviewer missed and some 80's trivia about the various sources of inspiration that went into the game. Did you ever watch any of those entertaining game review videos on youtube where the reviewer is actually playing the game, the video is just a screen capture of the game window in play, while the player or players are talking about what they are doing, and adding their own entertaining commentary along the way.

Some of them suck, but some are like that review of your game. Anyway I thought it would be really cool if you or somebody did a video review of your game in play and talking about it.

Even better would be to have two people talking to each other reminiscing about the original Ultima and the good ol days of retro gaming and trivia about 80's culture, traditional fantasy RPGs in general, and musing on the familiar old annoyances, crpg concepts and so on from 80's games, all while playing UltimaIV Part II.

What better place than here at Jolt Country to find such folks who would totally pull something like this off! The obvious choice would be you and the IF legend himself Robb Sherwin [ICJ]! Or Rob and his friends. Man, that would be some serious entertainment!
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Post by Chris H »

Yeah, he did a great job with the commentary. I haven't seen a video like what you're describing, but I can picture it, sort of like watching a DVD with the cast commentary. I'm not sure how it would work, as the humor in the game is primarily written, so written commentary seems to flow better.

Anyway, add one more mention of the game out there: On the forums of French site canardpc.com someone said, "Un sacré putain de chef d'oeuvre mes enfants!" which is (I did a translation on google) apparently a nice compliment. Merci, canardpc.com!

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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

Which of you is interested in my fine wares?

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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

Which of you is interested in my fine wares?

NihilVulture

ahem! :P

Post by NihilVulture »

Ahem!
Me too! :P I think I was the only one in Jolt Country who began the word of mouth for awe and power, and evil of ACK mwhaahhaaha! Anyways, I am happy to see that it wasn't only me who knew Chris's masterpiece :) It would be a bummer that a 30 year old (myslef) was the only one who knew this back in the day XD

Thanks Garth! And thank you Chris! I hope ACK goes up version 4 or 5 :D

yall take care

NihilVulture

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