Brickley's
Words

When 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!

My LDraw text generator, txt2dat has been updated. The new version can be found here.

Changes in this version:

1. Added “notdef” glyph to brick.ttf to fix problem with space being ignored.
2. Added $(MATH) to link flags in Makefile for Linux build.

Enjoy!

My LDraw text generator, txt2dat has been updated. The new version can be found here.

Changes in this version:

1. Font file now optional – will use the internal font from LDraw 1×1 bricks.
2. Fixed bug in checking for non-existent characters.

Also, the font file used for the default internal font is included in the source distribution as a TrueType font file. The font was created from the LDraw 1×1 bricks with letters, originally authored by Tore Eriksson. It only contains space, digits 0-9 and upper case A-Z. Lower case a-z are mapped to their upper case equivalent, all other characters will be ignored.

Duane Collicott is progressing on a nice looking cable-stayed bridge, you can read more about it here.

One day I should probably try a proper big suspension bridge, but I want to be able to use it in our train layout, so it will require a fair amount of planning, and probably multi-level tracks. Oh well, one day…

My LDraw text generator, txt2dat has been updated. The new version can be found here.

Changes in this version:

1. Use “LDraw inverse colour” for lines.
2. Fixed non-ansi definition of add_char() and add_string().
3. Implemented better algorithm for choosing the number of segments in splines.
4. Added -r option for spline resolution.
5. Some minor efficiency enhancements.
6. Updated FSF address.