Wizard's Castle was originally written by Joseph R. Power for Exidy Sorcerer Basic and published in the July 1980 issue of Recreational Computing Magazine.
This was later adapted by J.F. Stetson for Heath Microsoft Basic. More than just a port, this version made some textual improvements.
This Ruby port is based on the Stetson version, which is the version that I played growing up. The initial 1.0 release is intended to be as faithful as possible to the Stetson version, with these exceptions:
- I can't reproduce the original BASIC "beep" sound, so it just uses your terminal's bell
- It allows lower-case inputs instead of only caps
- You can actually scroll up (if your terminal allows)
I have plans for some improvements in post-1.0 versions. I intend to add options to enable a few color enhancements, and perhaps to slow the scroll down so your eyes can follow along through warp/sinkhole chains.
This dir has some other neat docs that may be of interest:
- castle.txt - What is displayed when you run
wizards-castle --manual. Aside from the obvious addition about my Ruby port, this is exactly what was distributed with J.F. Stetson's version. - WIZARD.BAS - original J.F. Stetson source (or, the best one I could find)
- original-article.pdf - This is a scan of the original article
from Recreational Computing magazine (July 1980) where Wizard's Castle first premiered.
castle.txtis adapted from this. - original-source.pdf - The Joseph R. Power-authored source code from that same article. (I am unable to find this source in text-file form.)
- interview.md - a 2007 interview with Joseph R. Power about the game
To see the entire July 1980 issue of Recreational Computing, visit
https://archive.org/details/1980-07-recreational-computing