THE RING OF THE INKA
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Scope:
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You find yourself aboard a raft, drifting on the sea with your destination, the west coast of South America coming into sight. Your boss has commanded you to search and retrieve one of the most precious treasures of the ancient Inka culture: A golden ring that exceeds the wildest dreams of every archaeologist. To make this happen, there are many adventures to be survived: fierce animals attempt on your life and you need to make friends with a native tribe.

Trivia:
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Michael Wiedmer (who used to be reachable via http://pdg-software.com but the site has not been updated for a long time) and I (http://bartheld.net) wrote this game back then, when the Sinclair ZX Microdrive finally allowed multi-location adventure games with space-demanding screen graphics. The Professional Adventure Writer from Gilsoft International was already on the market and so was the Graphic Adventure Creator (Incentive), but we wanted more control over game play, nicer imagery and fit all this into the Sinclair BASIC of a 48K Spectrum, which was a free interpreter already at our hands.

Yes, indeed: With the single exception of a wider/bold font, this adventure game uses no Z80 machine code (please have mercy if reactions to key presses are a tad on the slowish side!). Heavy compression of numbers (e. g. replacing 0 by the infamous NOT PI, 1 by SGN PI and decimal numbers by VAL "...") has the potential of reducing the memory footprint by around 1K but has been ditched in favor of execution speed. There is clever handling of command vocabulary through a lookup table with GO TO and GO SUB targets (synonyms can be used if necessary), complex maps have been implemented by means of a mesh with room numbers that (if multiplied by 10) relate to command lines as well. And there are even characters with (sort of) artificial intelligence.

In order to improve readability, we did not go to the extent separating the variables and array in a separate loader or even compressing text (e. g. with the ZX7 data compressor). This would have made the source code very hard to manage and introduced machine code again. However, there is a decent line wrapping subroutine (line 6000) to make the text more readable during runtime. Yes, there are even options to SAVE and LOAD the game state, but likely you need to make some room on the cartridge if you get a "Microdrive full" error.

Feel free to sneak around in the code and learn about programming adventures in ZX BASIC or in case you are stuck somewhere in the game. There's even a "DEBUG" command with activated invulnerability, additionally allowing you to teleport around rooms and conjure up invisible/inaccessible objects.

For the Crap Gaming Competition 2018, I have completely refurbished the code, corrected tons of bugs and typos introduced 30 years ago, added a cool loading screen and optimized everything so the entire game plus all screens would theoretically fit on a real cartridge.

Disclaimer: I did *NOT* play through the entire adventure, so there might be disappointments lurking.

How to run:
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Any decent emulator with Sinclair ZX Microdrive support will do. I have tested the the virtual cartridge with EightyOne. Here, just bring up Options/Hardware, select "Interface 1" as FDC (leave the IDE drop down at "None"), click Configure to verify that the Interface 1 ROM Release Edition is set to "Edition 2" and at least one Microdrive is connected. Then activate the File/Drives window and load the inka.mdv media into Drive 1.

Finally, just reset the emulated spectrum and type RUN <ENTER>, so the IF1 automatically executes the "run" loader file on the cartridge.

Have fun!

MAR 25th 2018, Volker Bartheld <web2018@bartheld.net>
