A lot of later Basic adventures (like those by Greg Hassett)
were built on the Dog Star design.
Dogstar was also available from something called The Software
Exchange, Inc.
At some point in time, the ownership of Dog Star Adventure
ended up with Misosys, whose owner gave Tim Mann
(mann@src.dec.com) permission to post all his old software.
The TRS-80 .BAS file that can be downloaded from here has a
primitive form of copy-protection (or maybe it was anti-cheat
protection): one of the line numbers early on is zapped to
65535, which stops the LIST command and the SAVE,A command
from listing or saving beyond that point.
Comments: Dogstar was your typical you're stuck in an enemy place with a
broken ship... get parts... don't get caught and get away...
featuring credit cards, guns, atomic whatzit to power the
craft...
DOG STAR ADVENTURE
by Lance Micklus
The evil General Doom and his Roche Soldiers are ready to
launch an attack against the Forces of Freedom, led by
Princess Leya. Enroute to a secret command center on the
planet Harris 7, Princess Leya's ship was attacked by Doom.
She is now being held prisoner on one of his battle cruisers.
It is a sorry day indeed!
The capture holds extra prizes for Doom and his men: onboard
Princess Leya's ship is the entire treasury of her Freedom
Fighting Force in a chest containing Melidium Crystals, the
currency used in this galaxy. The Princess is also wearing a
necklace made of shinestones. Encoded in one of the stones is
the location and strength of her Freedom Fighting Force.
Hopefully, Doom has not yet discovered the secret of the
necklace.
I, your computer, am your puppet. I'm hidden aboard the
Princess's ship. It is possibly, although very difficult,
that we may be able to save the day by rescuing Princess
Leya, her necklace, and the treasury. But even if we don't,
anything we can do to foil General Doom's plans may help win
a victory for peace in the galaxy.
We must be very careful of guards who are all over the ship.
We could easily be caught and imprisoned. Sometimes you may
only have enough time to give me one command, which if not
the appropriate action to take, could easily end the game for
both of us.
I understand ordinary English in one- or two-word commands.
If you want me to go somewhere, just give me a direction. I
can GET or DROP something just by your typing GET or DROP
plus the name of the object. You can SAVE a game on either
tape or disk by typing SAVE. A previously saved game can be
restored with the command LOAD. Other words I understand
include HELP, INVEN, LOOK, SCORE, and QUIT. In addition to
these, there are many other words in my vocabulary. The fun
of playing ADVENTURE is not only trying to figure out what to
do, but how to explain it to me.
HISTORY, HINTS and TIPS
The game of ADVENTURE was developed several years ago at the
Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. The
original game was written in FORTRAN and required a rather
large amount of disk drive storage space. The object of the
game was to explore an immense cave and bring back to a
building aboveground the many treasures found beneath the
earth.
Had it not been for the difficulties involved in implementing
the game on various computer systems, ADVENTURE might very
well have become more popular than STAR TREK. With the advent
of microcomputers, a new effort was made to overcome the need
for disk drives and large amounts of memory. As a result of
this effort, several new versions of ADVENTURE have been
released, not only for the TRS-80, but for other systems as
well. Even though these new micro versions of ADVENTURE may
deviate substantially from the original, they all share that
same childish logic characteristic of ADVENTURE.
In playing the game, you are basically trying to solve a
puzzle. At times you may find yourself running around in
circles; you may even go somewhere and find you actually went
nowhere. Use your imagination and apply childlike logic.
Finally, never forget that everything in this strange
computer-created world has a purpose ... there are clues
everywhere!
GOOD LUCK!
(The above text is the article associated with Dog Star
Adventure in Softside.)
