The Troll Hole Adventure | Hacker News Reader

The Troll Hole Adventure

bluerenga.blog

39 pointstodsacerdoti12 comments

I have a rather sizable collection of 1980s home computers with over a hundred different models (virtually all of the Ataris, Amigas, Apples, Commodores, Radio Shacks, Sinclairs, Amstrads, Dragons, MSX machines, etc). I started collecting them in the early 90s when most were less than $5 at thrift stores and I'd stopped collecting by the year 2000 because I basically had them all.

Collecting back when they were considered basically worthless junk by most people meant I paid no more than $30 for any one machine and most were actually given to me for free or shipping cost. I do have an Interact but it's one of the few I've never booted up as I never had one back in the day and being so obscure it wasn't one of the computers I lusted after but couldn't afford in the 80s. This article has inspired me to dig it out and fire it up. I heard from someone a few years back that apparently Interacts are quite valuable now due to their rarity (not that I'm in the market to sell any of mine).

I still have the Troll Hole Adventure on tape, along with the Interact that I learned programming on (MS basic! and machine code - we didn't have an assembler).

As I recall, you don't flick the lighter you "flick bic" as was the marketing slogan at the time. The response would rhyme "flick bic" lead to "lamps lit". Other exciting things were using the paper tube from the bathroom and the lenses from somewhere else to "make telescope" which allowed you to read a distant sign or billboard.... Fun times.

Oh right, there's a shovel and if you "dig frog" the response was "I can dig it" because you know... the 1970's...

The "I can dig it" happens if you do DIG on any object other than I think the dirt. Just DIG alone is what tests digging in a room (except it only works in the starting room to find anything).

Do you have any good pictures of the tape? There's a Youtube video of someone playing it on hardware so you can see the tape inside of the machine, but no clear pictures of the real tape.

(Also, hello, I wrote the post! There's a part 2 where I finish the game, and I'll be doing the other Interact adventure game, Mysterious Mansion, in about a week.)

The Trinity (I'd call them 2nd generation home computers with a screen and keyboard as opposed to 1st gen like the Altair that had a front panel and/or attached to a terminal) were easy to beat in terms of cost by third generation computers (TRS-80 Color Computer, VIC-20, Atari 400, ...) were based on ASIC for glue instead of the discrete logic used in the 2nd gen.

Modern attempts to build retrocomputers run into trouble being authentic because production runs are too small to justify an ASIC so they wind up using an FPGA or ESP32 for a display controller.

Fascinating to see there are still video games out there with no prior noted solutions or playthroughs.

I would have probably got frustrated and started decompiling it to find all the verbs and nouns :/

Obligatory reference from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CtOEig1l8SA

"You got to pay the troll toll if you want to get into this boy's hole!"

I read that headline in Danny DeVito’s voice. Always Sunny does musicals better than Broadway.

If you want this boys soul you’ve got to play the troll hole

It's really hard not to devolve into a giggling teenager with this headline and how perfectly it conjures up what is perhaps the most memorable Sunny in Philadelphia episode ever made.

If I'm being honest the only reason I clicked to the comments here is because I was expecting this

Literally just watched this episode the other day! Hell yeah.

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