Adventure Construction Set (ACS)

[KeighnMcDeath]

Seem the old site is now gone. I have the advtures from that site on backup and many the basics for c64, Dos, Amiga.

The appleII is giving me a headache not allowing me to make new adventure disks. It could just be screwed up .dsk images for the emulator. I’m missing Rivers of Light, Land if Adventuria, and the Spy-mystery set. There’s a few more sites I’ll check out and see if their images work but I have the feeling more of the same.

I ran into another site that had a media share link to 13 of his adventures as well. From my c64 I sent some disks to get converted to .d64 images so there might be yet 3-4 more adventures and some unfinished crap as I got into just making graphics for ACS at one point then trying to build a giant castle scenario (very unfinished).

If anyone has working .dsk Apple II images of ROL, LOA, & SPY/MYSTERY that be great. When I get the full package done I’ll chuck it into a Dropbox with a link to it. I just as well put manuals in there. Hell, I might put in versions of FRACAS, Ali-Baba & the 40 thieves, and Return of Heracles.

So for old nostalgia.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Archiving the Old

I've been working on trying to piece together all of the old Electronic Arts Adventure Construction Set Data I can. And let me tell you, it has been a pain in the ass since sites have dropped off and there has been little in the way of people from the past caring about it. Oh there is the niche group which is great but all the old adventures in storage seem gone. Maybe, if I can get enough attention brought back to this then they can be rearchived and maybe even Stuart Smith will pop up and give a nod. So, I will put up some stuff I have worked on. So far it has been getting copies of every thing for emulators and dosbox. God this was a headache in and of itself as not everything was available and I had to go through hoops and old broken laptops with shitty floppy drives and destroyed OS's with barely DOS on them to finally getting a copy of an emulated AppleII version that wasn't entirely corrupt so I could MAKE adventure disks. From there it was hell getting ACS to finish adventures and figuring out the emulators.

When I finally got all up and running to life-support standards I started to work on recording the sounds and music (as youtube had pretty iffy versions out). Once I did this and edited them via audacity and tried to clean them up the best I could considering they were entirely from emulation. (remember.. I can't program so that type of ripping and shit is beyond me).

After that, I have been spending months creating tilesets for all the basic modules for each platform. A real shitter was that I had to draw all the appleII tiles by hand on ms-paint as the screenshot cut/paste and copy just looked like crap. I can't say the final result is all to great but it is clean for the pixels in png and that's what counts if one is going to use them in say ACK or some other builder program. I have created tilesetes, individual tiles, and comparison sheets. this took ages it seems but it puts me up to the next level of working on the data in each module. Eventually, I will get an additional manual written with the shortcuts, dos and don'ts, and problems with the engine. There are some things that annoy the crap out of me and one would be speed of creation and drawing inside the program. Lordy is that slow and tedious.

I still have hopes to convert Stuart Smith's FRACAS from appleII to an ACS module for each platform. I wouldn't mind turning the Amiga version in a go to for even the older graphics on the other platforms (ie playing the amiga version with appleII graphics). The amiga has the most color and extra sounds. I must say my cleaned up versions sound better and I'm more partial to the C64 musical score and sound in many cases. Maybe if I work on the ACK I can just bypass all that guff except for the purists who won't play or work on anything but ACS instead (yeah.. like there are many of those around.. )

So here's what I have for you:
ACS Compilation version 1
This is what I started with and some of it is incomplete. It has some extras that I will eventually edit and try to clean up like old articles and manuals.

Stuart Smith's Other Games
Yeah, I included these for nostalgia purposes and if you wanted to try them out. I still have hopes to try and convert to acs but some of it is just impossible considering what the games entail and ACS just cannot do.

ACS Music/Sound Archive
After all my painstaking work I hope these came out OK. Some of the sounds are god awful and I don't know if that's the emulators or just the version period. Eh, it is what it is and back then it may have been great.

ACS COMPLETE TILESETS
I sure hope its complete. It is all the basic stuff in the types of modules for each of the 4 platforms (C64, AppleII, Amiga, DOS) (the modules being Land of Adventuria, Rivers of Light, Fantasy Set, Spy/Mystery Set, Science-Fiction Set, and Galactic Agent (Amiga Only)). I didn't include the modules out there yet or the latest entry from 2018 by a talented fellow. I will get to those later after all the basics are done.

The Basic Files for the Modules on their respectable platforms
A lot of this is repat of v1.0 but there is some clean up here and I included a disk so you can let ACS finish adventures on the AppleII. Basically you should be able to do all the basics here provided you have the correct emulators and dosbox. Its old shit and only oldies will give a damn but there ya go. I'll put up some screenshots of tilesets eventually or you can just download that and take a look for yourself. Maybe, I can get a website up and resurrect the ACS project.

I'm not a programmer, and never will be. The art isn't mine but it is displayed so you can see the differences between the platforms and settings on each. I'm not a musician or sound man so the zip of the sounds from all the games is the best I can do. They are all from emulators (dosbox also) so you get what you get.

There is nothing special what I'm doing other than trying to re-archive something that has been slipping into the cracks ...... AGAIN!

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I forgot about the old ACKS metal gear demake RPG

 

[Null Null]

Neat. I started making something with this back in the day but eventually switched to FRUA.

I fooled around with the Bard's Tale Construction Set too. I guess the D&D license is just too powerful--everyone knows how to make a D&D party.

 

[680x0]

ACS in DOS was my 1st real RPG. One of my earliest memories is my brother and I making a player character that was just a butt.

The box art is forever etched in my mind, I wish Mr. Smith had done more in the industry. Thanks for the preservation efforts Mr. McDeath.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I just found this old ACS viewer. The link to download still works and I’ll look at the source code on GitHub. I’ll need to archive the viewer if it works.

This is cool if it works.

“viewer Readme text”

Adventure Construction Set Viewer
Copyright 2016 Dan Boris (danlb_2000@yahoo.com)

License
--------------------
Adventure Construction Set Viewer (ACS Viewer) is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

ACS Viewer is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with ACS Viewer. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

System Requirements
-------------------

Windows XP or greater
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0


Features
--------

This program allows you to view the contents of the game files created with any version
of Adventure Construction Set. The program also has a rudimentary play function that allows you to walk
through the game maps.

System Notes:
In the IBM PC/MS-DOS version of Adventure Construction Set, adventures were stored as
a file named with ADVEN.FPY or ADVEN.HRD. Feel free to rename the file for collecting
purposes, but keep the extension. ACS Viewer will treat all .fpy and .hrd files as a
PC ACS adventures.

In the Commodore 64 version of Adventure Construction Set, adventures took up the
entire contents of a floppy disk. Commodore 64 floppy disks are represented for
emulation purposes as D64 files. ACS Viewer will try to open any .d64 file as a
Commodore 64 ACS adventure. Note that when using an emulator or disk viewing
program on an ACS adventure .d64, it will appear to be empty.

Note: Different Commodore 64 emulators have different ideas of how to represent
the colors of a Commodore 64 and there are also PAL vs. NTSC differences. This
program uses the palette used by the CCS64 emulator, but you might want to use
a different set of colors. The VICE emulator comes with a set of .vpl files
representing different palettes. The files can also be modified in a text
editor to create exactly the colors you want. To use one of these files
instead of the CCS64 palette, save it in the same directory as AcsViewer.exe
under the name "palette.vpl". The next time you run ACS Viewer it will use
the new palette when opening adventures for the Commodore 64.

In the Apple II version of Adventure Construction Set, adventures took up the
entire contents of a floppy disk. Apple II floppy disks are represented for
emulation purposes as DSK files. ACS Viewer will try to open any .dsk file as an
Apple II ACS adventure. Note that if you try using an emulator or disk viewing
program on an ACS adventure .dsk, you will get an error message, as the disk
is so full of information it doesn't have room for a directory.

In the Commodore Amiga version of Adventure Construction Set, adventures were stored as
a file named Adventure on the floppy disk. Amiga floppy disks are represented
for emulation purposes as ADF files. ACS Viewer is bundled with a command-line tool
called UAEUNP (Unified Amiga Emulator file UNPacker). This took was taken from the
UAE emulator, distributed via the GNU General Public License.

If you try to use ACS Viewer to open an .adf file, it will call UAEUNP behind the
scenes to extract and then open the Adventure file that was inside it. Feel free to
rename Adventure to any name you like, just so long as the file has no
extension - I suggest calling it something like Amgiga_AdventureName. Once the file
has been extracted, you open it directly instead of accessing the .adf file again.


Source Code
-----------

The source code for the project can be opened and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015. The source code
can be found here:

https://github.com/danlb2000/ACSViewer


Revision Log
------------
V1.0 - 11/25/2016 - First release, for PC and Commodore versions of game.
V2.0 - 02/14/2020 - Added support for Apple and Amiga versions of game.

We get a nice look at the c64 demo screen in this video that I have watched on original hardware and emulated before several times. I should check for the other versions again.




Lordy is this really the best and only dos example of the demo? Yeesh

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ok, found a few c64 apps i'll try.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

And they were shit from the app store:

• GEKKO C64 Emulator: A fast and easy-to-use emulator that was programmed from scratch. It includes features like a joystick in port 1 and 2, a switch for the 1541 floppy drive, and fast loading.
  
  ​
  • 
    
    
    
• Emu64 XL: A fast and easy-to-use emulator based on VICE that comes with various programs and sources written in CBM64 basic

Gecko is preloaded games you have to fiddle with loading and shit that is just dumb. If you can't load your own d64 or t64 or w/e then just have a menu and let the games load up select the touch gamepad or computer or select the bluetooth controller option. And many of the 29 pages are just sid music files. Nothing loaded, took forever (I don't want real time emulation like says of old I want instant), and plainly didn't work. Rubbish and shit.

Emu64 XLEmu64 XL is even more shit. There are ads you can't get rid of but you can load a d64 file sort of. When you select it it takes you to a page that says you need to encode it. Click that button and it opens up THIS PAGE

Load your d64 and it takes a bit to turn ti code you copy then open up the still running emulator and paste then hit load d64. Then on the keyboard you type the standard loading like LOAD"*",8,1. Then hit run when it says. I actually got the ACS running but no sound even though all was checked. The fucking ads were over part of the small screen. Rinse and repeat to get say an adventure running since there is a disk swap. My disk failed to register anything so maybe my upload is corrupted or the dl corrupted (shrug). Or it just fucking don't work as if locked up repeatedly. And one comment said it wanted to track everything (i had to allow notepad to copy/paste.

Yeah, it is shit and junk. Last to try is on github called
AndyQ/C64Emulator: An emulator for iOS based on Vice 2.3.

I am having my doubts it'll work either. Meh!

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Just the game & game files no shit:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/tig9acfizfgteq6/ACS+&+Smith.zip/file

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ok. This link above should work. Google drive & dropbox were being cunts. Mediafire it is.