PAW / GAC to create adventures?

[animaal]

I'm a bit of a fan of adventure games... back in the day I had Gilsoft's "The Quill" and "The Illustrator", used to create my own. I must say, the quality packaging alone was worth the hefty price tag.

I now own a copy of "Graphic Adventure Creator", but to be honest I'm more used to Gilsoft's way of working.

I've been keeping my eye on eBay for a copy of Gilsoft's later release, Professional Adventure Writer, but while I've seen a number of sales of GAC over the past months, I haven't seen any copies at all of PAW.

Does this reflect relative popularity back in the day? Was GAC so much more popular than PAW? Was it considered superior? I would have thought PAW's ability to use 128KB of RAM would have made it popular.

[8BitAG]

GAC sold a lot more copies than the PAW. It came out earlier, when adventures were more popular, and it benefitted from hefty promotion through the Home Computer Club.

The PAW is a lot rarer, particularly the +3 version. You don't see it come up for sale that often. I consider myself very lucky to have a tape and a disk version.

There some late-in-life versions of the PAW, such as the magazine offers, which consisted of a starter pack (without the fancy box) with the option to later upgrade to the technical manual... so don't be put off if you do see the PAW for sale without the plastic clam shell (which are very brittle and usually broken these days anyway).

PAW is far superior to the GAC, but it only came to a couple of platforms officially.

The PAW is still a joy to use and write games with, particularly when using the inPAWS text editing source system; rather than the cumbersome database editor. For those that want cross-platform Gilsoft-style tools, then there's DAAD.

[Morkin]

Interesting that it's hard to find, I'd quite like to know how many copies P.A.W. sold compared to G.A.C. It came out fairly late IIRC. I had an... err... copy... but couldn't really get into it, after getting used to The Quill, Illustrator, Patch & even Press.

I recall people being quite excited about being able to construct longer sentences, use adverbs, and have wider facilities for things like mobiles (characters that wandered around).

In hindsight I think the Quill's VERB NOUN worked fine, it's what a lot of people had got used to, and the later ensuing point & click games that evolved did so by reducing text complexity.

[8BitAG]

I recall people being quite excited about being able to construct longer sentences, use adverbs, and have wider facilities for things like mobiles (characters that wandered around).

In hindsight I think the Quill's VERB NOUN worked fine, it's what a lot of people had got used to, and the later ensuing point & click games that evolved did so by reducing text complexity.

There's no need to complicate things outside VERB NOUN if you don't want to.

To be honest, I rarely use all the multi-word parsing, adverbs, and PSI character stuff.

It's the basic stuff that like the process tables and greatly expanded range of "code" (condacts) that makes the PAW an essential upgrade to the Quill. You can do some incredibly cool, complex or unique things using those that take the system beyond The Quill.

[StooB]

I'd quite like to know how many copies P.A.W. sold compared to G.A.C.

Very hard to compare sales when the Home Computer Club were practically giving away GAC for £2.25 as an introductory offer, and they also made it their "Main Selection" so it was automatically sent to members who didn't refuse it in time.

[8BitAG]

Despite the huge difference in sales numbers, the fact that we've got over three and a half times more Spectrum PAW games documented than GAC ones says something about the power and ease of use of the two systems.

[Morkin]

I would've quite liked to have a decent go at GAC or PAW, but despite really wanting to do location graphics, I was rubbish at them.

Just about every location graphic I tried to draw at the time ended up looking something like this

[spider]

I had GAC when it was new, it was actually OK however if you start to draw pics as well (even badly like I do!) you'll soon run out of memory.

Original Quill may seem a bit crude (or PAW perhaps) but the former when combined with Illustrator -and- patch/press to allow you to have splitscreen pics is well worthwhile if a bit fiddly to get right.

Despite that, I'm better with Quill than I ever was with GAC! , I guess porting a few games between platforms was my 'learning curve' as at that time, there was no readily available help for it, but its not that difficult just time consuming and watching out for flag differences!

PAW is very good. As stated the English .dsk is or was not too easy to find, I did submit it to WOS a long time ago but it never appeared, but it was better than the CPM disk image they had at that time iirc.

[8BitAG]

Not to say that the CP/M PAW isn't great in itself as it creates very portable games that you can play on all sorts of machine... and it's also the version that really evolved into systems like the SWAN and DAAD, as it was a compiler-based system rather than the database editing system of Spectrum PAW.

But yes, Spectrum +3 was accidentally overlooked in terms of the archive for ages and it was great when that game was finally fixed. It is the best version to use, really, despite having access to slightly less of the 128K memory. It's still my version of choice to use, as it's the version I had "back in the day".

[+3code]

Why isn't the standard PAWS+3 version (English) uploaded in the database? Is there a problem with it? If not I will upload the file (I know I have it somewhere).

[8BitAG]

Why isn't the standard PAWS+3 version (English) uploaded in the database? Is there a problem with it? If not I will upload the file (I know I have it somewhere).

I'm not sure. It took ages to get it uploaded to original WOS... I thought that it had been added here. The file is available through the officially sanctioned repository for the Gilsoft systems.
http://8-bit.info/the-gilsoft-adventure-systems/

[stupidget]

Very hard to compare sales when the Home Computer Club were practically giving away GAC for £2.25 as an introductory offer, and they also made it their "Main Selection" so it was automatically sent to members who didn't refuse it in time.

Yep, that is exactly what happened to me

I actually had a lot of fun using GAC and my mate and me made some pretty simple adventures. One that I wish we'd finished was about having to break out of prison and prove that you were innocent. From what I remember we got as far as being able to break out of prison and get to a local town. What's odd is that to escape you had to crawl along a sewage tunnel which was very Shawshank Redemption even though neither of us had read the book.

[Timmy]

There really is no point to compare about release numbers.

Especially because GAC was also given away on a covertape.

Therefore GAC had lots more copies sold than PAW.

GAC is just a bit older, but there is a lot of documentation out there.

It also doesn't support 128K banking without some (simple) modifications.

But it's not difficult to make an adventure out of it (at least, for me).

[PeterJ]

@+3code and @8BitAG,

Thanks for spotting the omission. As long as it's not a denied file, please upload via Pavel's form.

Thanks

[+3code]

Done. I've uploaded too the +3 Supplement (PDF).

[Morpheus]

I have original GAC's for my Spectrum & CPC but I haven't been able to pick up a copy of PAW for either machine sadly. It's a bit fiddly setting up a working disk on the CPM version for the CPC and the manual says to use text editors like HiSoft's ED80 but I just get gibberish when I try and open the Start.sce file but that's probably down to my lack of experience. So I use the Speccy version of PAW for my dabbling in writing adventure games these days as they are way more advanced in what they can do. Back in the 80's I used GAC only, I had seen adverts for The Quill and Illustrator but didn't know much about them at the time, I think I would have swapped over if I had realized how good The Quill was. That being said I think I had a pretty good adventure by the end of the summer hols, I had spent six weeks in my room playing games and working on it. Sadly all my save tapes are long gone so I have no way of knowing how it would be received these days.
But I do think that GAC can still produce a decent game. I remember I used to have a border picture set to 255 and then merge that with say Picture 1 so I didn't have to draw the border over and over as I had done it like a bas relief kind of effort to make it look more Submarine/Steel looking.

[8BitAG]

I have original GAC's for my Spectrum & CPC but I haven't been able to pick up a copy of PAW for either machine sadly.

It is pretty rare, although several copies have been up on eBay over the past month or so. I am very lucky in that I have both a tape and a +3 copy... which I will never get rid of.

It's a bit fiddly setting up a working disk on the CPM version for the CPC and the manual says to use text editors like HiSoft's ED80 but I just get gibberish when I try and open the Start.sce file but that's probably down to my lack of experience. So I use the Speccy version of PAW for my dabbling in writing adventure games these days as they are way more advanced in what they can do.

Using inPAWs on a PC and a text editor like Visual Studio Code makes writing both Spectrum and Amstrad CP/M PAWed games (simultaneously!) very, very easy these days. A single source file can generate both a Spectrum and CPC version of the game. It's still my favourite tool to use.

Back in the 80's I used GAC only, I had seen adverts for The Quill and Illustrator but didn't know much about them at the time, I think I would have swapped over if I had realized how good The Quill was.

The GAC was a little more powerful than the Quill/Illustrator combo, but you had to have a certain type of brain to get on well with it. Quill seemed to work better for less-programmer types.

But I do think that GAC can still produce a decent game.

I don't like GAC at all and I like very few GAC games. I find them almost unplayable these days. The GAC is just too slow and buggy on the Spectrum. On the Amstrad CPC it's a better and a lot more reliable... it's also a lot quicker with the third-party graphics patch. It wasn't unusual, back in the day, for Spectrum PAWed games to get ported to the Amstrad using the GAC.

[+3code]

It also doesn't support 128K banking without some (simple) modifications.

I've never knew about this. GAC with 128 support? That is new for me.

[stupidget]

When I upgraded from a 48 to 128k Speccy +2 I could never get GAC to load. Even on the +2 that I have now I still can't get it to load. is there something I need to do to get it to work?

[spider]

When I upgraded from a 48 to 128k Speccy +2 I could never get GAC to load. Even on the +2 that I have now I still can't get it to load. is there something I need to do to get it to work?

I had this exact issue too because I got a (grey) +2 a few months after my rubbery keyed friend died.

Its the PowerLoad loader that is the primary cause.

Try to load GAC in 48K mode from the menu, if I recall it should work then. Not USR0 or SPECTRUM from 128K Basic nor the Tape Loader option.

Failing that there are .tap (non Incentive PL) versions about, there's probably one here if not I'll find one in my collection for you.

[Timmy]

I've never knew about this. GAC with 128 support? That is new for me.

Well, almost. GAC officially doesn't have 128K support. But...

Many many years ago, I've actually had an exercise to see what I could do with the GAC format (because I loved it so much), so I wrote a completely new interpreter (or virtual machine?) in C that parses the GAC files. So there exists an interpreter that can be used to execute and run them.

"Any Treasure Day", a game I unofficially released many years ago, was a result of this. It uses this new engine, while the data is fully readable in the old GAC editor.

Because it's in C, it is very portable. This was how I converted ATD to the MSX, with minimal changes in the interpreter.

It's not very hard for me to extend this interpreter to 128K, I had some experiments with it, but the main thing is that I haven't written a really large adventure yet.

Note: There are no graphics in my interpreter. This is mainly because the way the spectrum graphics are stored is not really portable, and their graphics routines have some bugs that I would have to replicate. I haven't found a good alternative for that yet.

Note 2: If you found the source code of ATD (it's out there somewhere), you'll see that it looks like a text file with lots of GAC commands. I also wrote a compiler so that I don't have to use the editor version to write every line. (However, the status of that compiler is still in alpha.)

[8BitAG]

That sounds really interesting. I'd spotted and catalogued Any Treasure Day when it came out for the MSX, but wasn't sure how the GAC implementation there was done... I know that, in the past, there had been a couple of solutions for GAC>MSX, such as Renato Degiovani's Sistema Editor de Adventures... so I'd presumed it was something similar.

Any links to your system you could share would be great. It sounds really interesting.

Did you compile ATD to any other machines, other than the MSX?

Re. 128K support for GAC. The community has recently retro-fitted 128K support for the Spectrum version of DAAD, adapting an existing community produced disk-loading extension to instead store the additional messages and graphics in the memory pages.

One of the disappointments of 8-bit GAC was that it was never improved on. The Spectrum bugs, particularly the ones involving memory issues weren't fixed. The promised GAC+ for Amstrad, with disk enhancements, was never released and the eventual GAC+ for Commodore 64 was little more than the US version of the system, which added some disk support that made multi-part games a lot easier to implement. It's a shame as the improved 16-bit STAC, by all accounts, was a great system to use.

[Timmy]

Sorry if I'm a bit slow. It took me hours to write the other post, because I had to verify some of the claims there, and had to look up on stuff. Also, English is still not my first language.

That sounds really interesting. I'd spotted and catalogued Any Treasure Day when it came out for the MSX, but wasn't sure how the GAC implementation there was done... I know that, in the past, there had been a couple of solutions for GAC>MSX, such as Renato Degiovani's Sistema Editor de Adventures... so I'd presumed it was something similar.

I don't know how other people did it or that there were other implementations. My implementation was written from the available documentation and not from existing machine code. (Because I really didn't want to read z80 code for this.) But I guess other people could just repackage the original z80 binaries to the msx.

Any links to your system you could share would be great. It sounds really interesting.

A lot of the information is located on the other site (not weird since I wrote it 10 years ago). I don't know if I should post these links here.

I'm also too new on this site to know how I can store binaries in a reply yet. I'd need some help here.

Did you compile ATD to any other machines, other than the MSX?

Not yet. But that might be an interesting idea. I've always considered ATD a tech demo so I was surprised of the reception it got.

====

I'll discuss your other points in a later post. Because I guess that part is going to be a lot of text.

[8BitAG]

Ah, I see that Any Treasure Day dates way back to at least 2013 and there is a mention of Any Treasure Day running via FZX/z88dk. A lot of the download links/screenshots no longer work, given the fact it's eight or so years later.

[+3code]

It seems MIA. In internet I can only find the MSX version of "Any Treasure Day" (MSXdev'18). Could be nice to have it uploaded in the database, if possible.