Cloned Games

Castlequest

HaltedPlayableLinux

Based on Castlequest

About

This repository is an authorized preservation release of the original 1980 Castlequest by Michael S. Holtzman and Mark Kershenblatt, a Fortran game. The source was recovered from 78 pages of paper copies obtained from the U.S. Copyright Office deposit, scanned, and manually transcribed into text, from which the buildable Fortran source files were mechanically extracted. It's built with f77 or gfortran and requires ALL CAPS input, with output needing an `asa` utility (or a provided Python equivalent) to correctly interpret old-style printer carriage-control characters; development has since halted.

Getting started

Check out the project's patches branch, build it with `make` (requiring f77 or gfortran), and run the resulting binary piped through `asa` or the included Python asa.py script to correctly render its output; all input must be typed in capital letters.

History

The source was recovered in 2021 when Mark Kershenblatt obtained 78 pages of paper copies from the U.S. Copyright Office deposit, which Arthur O'Dwyer scanned, combined into a PDF, and manually transcribed into plain text.

Additional notes

Trivia
Arthur O'Dwyer offered a $5 'bug bounty' per error found in his manual transcription of the original copyright deposit.
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