Episode: 2334 Title: HPR2334: Our Adventure Begins! Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2334/hpr2334.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:26:02 --- This is HPR episode 2,334 titled Our Adventure Begins. It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about 16 minutes long and Karima Cleanflag. The summary is, I discuss colossal cave adventure and the adventure of playing it with my son. This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com. Hello hacker public radio, this is Claudio M. Also known as Claudio Miranda in the real world, I wanted to do a little hacker public radio episode here on my personal experience some time ago. Not too long ago, but rather recently, I'll say over the Memorial Day weekend with a game that many of you may have played when it was originally out or originally created or originally available on back in the day. In the 70s and 80s or on your home computer, or even now, or recently if you've ever dealt into the terminal and played or loaded the BSD games package, talking about adventure or as it's fully known colossal cave adventure, well as I said or the Memorial Day weekend, I came across the news that colossal cave adventure was open sourced. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, well, I'm going to put in the link in the show notes to the Wikipedia entry for colossal cave adventure. Most of the stuff I'm getting right now is actually from a blog post I did back in, well yeah, it was actually over the Memorial Day weekend, so I'll put the link to that because there's some video there that you will add on to this episode. So yeah, colossal cave adventure was open sourced and the person that took the task to open source it with the blessing of the original authors was Eric S. Raymond, aka ESR, well known for his cathedral and the bizarre and very well known in the open source community. He was encouraged actually by the original authors to open source it to clean it up and ship it under an open source license, well as as I said, he took on that task and thus open adventure was born. Now I haven't downloaded this yet, I said in my blog post that I would intend to and I just completely forgot just life gets in the way, but but anyway, so if you really want to get a feel for what this game is like, it's a text adventure game, I don't know if any of you are familiar with those of you that are around my age or so, it shouldn't be familiar with the the info column text adventure games, well this is very much like that as a matter of fact, I think this is the granddaddy of them all, so all of them being inspired by this, if I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments, but yeah, so he open sourced it called it open adventure. Now you might be thinking, well big deal, okay, this is the same thing as what's in the BSD games package, I just saw that play it, actually no, the version that he open source was actually from the original code, the original version that Crowther and Woods, the authors, had made it, had created and that has actually been updated all the way up to. 1995 and the version that he asserted that he open sourced is the latest latest version of the original Crowther and Woods release, which as I said, from 1995, so it has a lot of stuff that's updated in it that you won't find in the BSD games version because the BSD, the one that's in the BSD games package is based on the original code from that from the 1970s. So it's missing a lot of stuff, so you may want to go ahead and grab the source code for open adventure, I'm not sure if it'll eventually end up in the repositories for your favorite Linux distribution or BSD flavor or what have you, but I'm sure it will, being open source, someone will put it in there, but anyway, so I went ahead and I had played it here and there, but this time around after seeing this, I really wanted to give it a try. And so I went ahead and I installed the BSD games package on my Fedora laptop, and my intention was to get my middle sign into it because he likes to use the computer that I have and Fedora installed on and that figured, let me give, he's more open to playing different types of games than my other two kids are, so let me give him, let me give him a taste of what the text adventure games are like. So, but before I go into this, I want to go into a little bit of history on, on my own childhood experience of text adventure games, so yeah, I grew up during the burgeoning home computer industry in the late 1970s and 80s, I was born in 72, just so you know, just to be exact. So, my introduction to these computer based, computer based text adventure games was at a friend's house owner, Commodore Vic 20. Now, if I recall correctly, I think it was called Adventure 2 Pirate Cove. Now, in my blog post, I have a YouTube video of it, I'll go ahead and include the link as well for the YouTube videos so you can get a feeling for what it's like. But yeah, so that was one that I was exposed to, that was my introduction to the text adventure games. Now, me having always been an Atari kid, I had the Atari 2600 and then I graduated from that to the Calico Vision and I even, I had even learned basic on a Commodore pet at school and they had these, after school activities. So, you know, I was still more into the whole video thing, but when I was introduced to this, I was very intrigued by it. Of course, no graphics at all, it was all the graphics, all the imagery was in your mind. And I was never one, I was never the kind of kid that would look forward to reading, I hated to read, I hated to read, but this engaged me a whole lot more than any plain old book could. Heck, I was even a fan of the interactive books where you can select, you were given the option, if you want to go down this path, go to the next page, if not skip to page so and so. And I love those books, but of course, they're very limited as far as what you can do. So, this computer text adventure game just took, for me, it seemed like it took that interactive book concept and just made it so much more dynamic. So, I had myself imagining, as I was playing the game, imagining what was being described in just text, and I felt myself going through a range of emotions as my friend and I entered the commands with results that we had no idea what happened. So, since then, I had delved into similar games, as I mentioned, like from Infercom and others, and I would just spend hours upon hours, or at night, just playing these games, late, late nights, just playing these games, just completely engrossed in the gameplay of these text adventure games. And that was from when I had my Matelle Aquarius, because that was my first computer, all the way up until I upgraded to my apples you see. I had some games, some friends of mine, they let me hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, and that one had me hooked for a while, and I would get stuck. Now, and as just for me, there wasn't any video game that could even come close to this kind of experience. So, let's time hop forward to that Memorial Day weekend, okay? I put BSD games on my fedora laptop for my son, hey, come here, let's sit down here together, and let's play this game together. So, I even went so far as to hit all the F2 and drop down to a complete virtual console, that way I could get the whole full experience of an actual text adventure. No, no exor, no nothing, just complete command line. And as he sat, my son sat there with me, he was kind of hesitant, he was like, I don't know if I want to do this, but as time passed and I started to show him how navigate within the game, I could see it, I could see, I could see what happened to me as a kid, I could see it happening to him, he would just slip into the world on the colossal cave, and text and ventures in general just as I do when I was a stage. Now, we would both go on this adventure and discover new ways of just kind of surpassing obstacles or die trying and boy, did we die trying a lot, but we had fun, we just had a great time together the whole time. And after a while, he actually started taking the laptop away from me, he just grabbed it and started commandering the machine himself, he just wouldn't let me type anything. So, I just let him have it, I told him to go on and figure it out, and put in the commands, and I tell him, no go this way, and he would say, no, I'm going to go this way, it was just great, it was, there was no doubt about it, he was completely hooked. And so, that night, I had him install BSD games on his laptop, which I had put a temporary for door installation because his hard drive had died, so I gave him a spare hard drive just for now until his mom can get him a new hard drive and I put the door on it, because this hard drive I had was too small for when those 10, which is what he normally uses there. So, I installed that, and I also installed on the Fedora desktop that I have at home, so that way I can play on it there. So, I had spoken to him the day after, when I was back at work on that Tuesday, after Memorial Day, and he actually called me, and he told me that he couldn't sleep thinking of how to get past some of the obstacles in the game, and he's already installed the Android corner phone, so I told him that I would try and see about finding some of the text adventure games like Zork and all those, which I remember playing, but I never really had it, and I just kind of played it when I was in stores, but those were ones that were real fun. Now, there is a package called Frots that will allow you to run the games like Zork. I tried testing it out a while ago, but I didn't have much luck, and I kind of just dropped it there, because things just kind of kind of busy, so I want to see if I can eventually come back to that. So, yeah, so hopefully that will be something that I can get installed for him that way we can start embarking on our next text adventure. So, yeah, the fun thing, I remember playing that was the special magic words, such as XYZZY, which would do certain things, but I won't give away, if you haven't played, I don't want to give away what it does, you can figure that out for yourself. Oh, and I did finally manage to kill the Wampus. So, yeah, that's another game that's in the BSD Games package, so that one is a little different in the gameplay, but still kind of fun. And he actually showed me a picture, my son, that he managed to kill the Wampus as well, so very proud, very proud of my son. So, but anyways, just check it out, be sure to check out the links in the show notes. If you have some sort of Linux or Unix-like operating systems installed, feel free to install BSD Games, do a search using your respective package manager. It's named differently, for example, on free BSD, it's BSD Games, but on Fedor, it's BSD hyphen Games, so you might want to watch out for that. Anyways, I know there's one other thing, but I think I need to do something else. Let me type this one command here, let me see. J-U-N-A-S-T-S. Oh, oh! Okay. Thank you for listening. Opening Sound clip taken from the Hobbit and Unexpected Journey. Closing Song is the Free Software Song performed by Mark Forrey, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Ernie Provincher, and Dan Oville. You can find this version of the Free Software Song at www.gnu.org, forward slash music, forward slash free, dash software dash song.en.html You can find this version of the Free Software Song performed by Mark Forrey, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAtee, Yvette Osborne, Ron Fox, Steve Finney, Bill Cope, Kip McAte This true hacker's round is true But they cannot help their neighbors Perhaps not, good hackers Perhaps not, good hackers Then we have the enough free software Now our call hackers Now our call Now throw out those dirty licenses Now our call hackers Now our call Join us now and share the software Now our call hackers Now our call Join us now and share the software Now our call hackers Now our call Join us now and share the software Now our call Join us now and share the software Now our call You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club And it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution, share a light, free dot o license