Advent ported to Perl
June 29th, 2005 by RoscoHeadWhen I was in high school, we had a PDP11 mini-computer which was used in various classes for lots of interesting stuff. Well actually, when I say “we had” I actually mean “we had access to” – the computer itself resided elsewhere, we just had a couple of terminals and a line-printer connected to it.
Anyway, 2 of the games available on it were Super Star Trek (sst), and Colossal Cave Adventure (advent), both of which I used to play quite a lot.
Then, many years later, I decided to teach myself the Perl programming language. And it just happened that I came across the original Fortran source for advent around the same time. So I decided porting advent to Perl would be a way to learn the language while having fun too.
So the result was this Perl program (remove the .txt after downloading). It mostly worked, except for a couple of bits, like the wizard, which works a bit but not fully. But the game itself works fine, and you can save game positions.
However, it must be said that it was ported on a pretty old version of Perl (4 point something I think), so it is unlikely to work with more recent versions without some tweaking.
It also requires the original advent.dat file, which I’ve made available here.
Anyway, here it is, for what it’s worth, and if you get something out of it, well that’s just a bonus!