This is a text adventure a friend and I created all the way back in 1998.
After initially developing the game in what must have been QuickBASIC, it seems that I ported it to the C language I was just getting comfortable with at the time.
The C version of the game was developed for MS-DOS using the Borland C++ IDE, including the proprietary functions it provided. This repository holds a Windows console conversion of that version, developed in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. You will need to install the "Desktop development with C++" workload to be able to build it. The original 1998 BASIC and C sources are included in the repo for the purposes of preserving history and general entertainment.
With the original DOS console long gone, I've refactored the game to use ncurses on *nix-like systems, and PDCurses on Windows. This enables some basic console manipulation, whilst not resorting to Windows-specific console functions. (Originally I used my own PDCurses-sources-turned-Visual-Studio-project version of PDCurses, but I have since then switched to the PDCurses package supplied by the excellent vcpkg tool.)
After that, for non-Windows platforms, I've added a CMake build configuration. With this, R136 has been verified to build and run on at least:
- Windows using Visual Studio 2019, both as a VC++ solution and using CMake
- Windows with MSYS2/MinGW64 using GCC and PDCurses
- Windows with MSYS2/MinGW64 using GCC and ncurses
- WSL (Ubuntu) using GCC and ncurses
- MacOS using (MacOS native) Clang and ncurses
The game was originally only available in the Dutch language, but has now been translated to English as a second language. The source code itself is now fully in English, also. I guess international awareness & orientation took a couple of decades to develop in me, but here we are. (Note: getting R136 to start in English requires the -e command line argument to be passed to it; Dutch is still the default.)
- Peter Wouda - co-creator, primary game designer and idea fountain extraordinaire. Since then, Peter became the creator of the physical board game Skipp
- Machiel Keizer - tester
Due to the fact that a CMake build configuration is included, you should be able to build R136 from source code on all systems that have installed:
- CMake version of 3.15 or newer
- a C/C++ build toolchain that is supported by CMake (which includes all "common" ones)
- a version of (n/PD)curses with wide-character support
On Windows, I recommend using the PDCurses version provided by vcpkg. Installation instructions for vcpkg can be found on Microsoft's website.
Also available are:
- A version of R136 developed in C#.NET, that includes both a console and a WebAssembly in-browser web application version. You can find that in the R136.NET repository.
- An updated version of the original 1998 procedural C++ version that requires Borland C++ 5.02 to build, and using that can be compiled to work on the original Intel 8086 CPU. That can be found in the R136-8086 repo.
- Rutger van Bergen - github.com/rbergen