The Quill & AdventureWriter
The Quill is a text adventure creator made by Gilsoft. It was very popular in the 80s for the Sinclair (ZX & Spectrum). It was ported to different platforms such as the Atari 8bit family, Commodore 64, Apple II, and BBC Micro, but it was only released in Database version A (it also exists version C, which brings more statements to make smaller scripts as AUTOG, AUTOD, AUTOW, and AUTOR. Please see The Quill's manual for more information).
This version was published in the USA as AdventureWriter (ADW) by Codewriter Corporation; more information can be found on Wikipedia.
Regardless Quill's fame in Europe in the Atari scene wasn't that successful; now, with a vast collection of games on the net, I could find several titles, however, a few were made in the 90s.
Comparing both versions, they use different screen resolutions based on each computer's default text screen. Atari has 40 characters, and Sinclair has 32 width; with this difference in resolution, problems in text padding and showing the whole screen (when the screen is full of text) make trouble.
Also, the Sinclair version may use UDG where the programmer could insert its own defined character to make graphics, besides the text in Sinclair has more effects as INK, VIDEO, BLINK, etc. in constraint Atari we can only use inverse video.
The last and probably the most significant difference (and constraint) is that the Atari version has only 22,923 bytes, and Sinclair has 30,553 bytes, which is a difference of 7,630, which| is almost 8kb! (a lot for these vintage machines).
Summary among ports:
| System | Free Memory |
| Sinclair | 30,553 |
| Atari | 22,923 |
| Commodore | 31,754 |
| Apple IIe | 21,760 |
| Amstrad | 27,995 |
It's fun the warning the manual says:
Caution:
When creating a real adventure, it is possible to run out of memory, which would cause an error in operation and likely corrupt your database. Use the option M from the Main menu every so often to see how much available memory you have left. For safety's sake, leave yourself plenty of space
of course... plenty of space...
The idea was to convert as many games for Atari (yeah, I know not many players are going to play it in this machine; however, it was something always got my attention since I had ADW from the 80s). With the help of the great parser Unpaws for Z80 Quill games from IF Archive I was able to see the code and automates the process.
Finally, I had to make three kinds of conversions:
Software
Scans
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New Games
Feasible games I was able to convert successfully:
(i) used 32 characters width to avoid many text padding, thus saving bytes; otherwise, it wasn't fitted.
(ii) I had to use ". " for CRLF.
(iii) it has been filled every message with 8 spaces for padding.
(g2f) it has a presentation screen in g2f, done with
Integrator 3.0.
(zx) original Sinclair game
All these fixes make games (sort of) unreadable, but it was the only option to fit the whole game in ADW.
G2F
Integrator is a tool for joining a G2F picture before an executable. Several neat conversions from the original ZX games, from Arkadiuz and Kaz: G2F gallery, were done.
Legacy
Games made with AdventureWriter by other authors (obtained from atarionline.pl)
These are other games found at atarimania.com
Games found at homesoft
Games found at Page 6
TODO
Acknowledge
Many thanks to authors and owners of the different software/sites where I retrieved information: to atari , atarimania, atarionline.pl, atariage, wikipedia, world of spectrum, homesoft, and many others.