In my youth I had some spare money to spend and a public domain software catalog for the Apple II and so I bought a few software titles. Among those titles was the Eamon Adventures Master and a handful of adventures written for that software system. I was immediately hooked on these adventures and played them for many hours.

Fast forward about 30 years and I am reading about various work people have done bringing Infocom games to other platforms or improve the game on those platforms. One of the main ones being the Tandy Color computer and it got me thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to port Eamon over to the CoCo.

Eamon was written in Applesoft BASIC. The master disk contained the logic for character creation and adventure selection and each adventure disk contained the game engine along with the specific data files for the adventure. Modern tools make it easy to extract the BASIC code and data so all that is left to me is translating the game engine to the appropriate language for running on the CoCo.

I could have chosen to keep the whole thing in BASIC but the game engine always felt a bit slow to me so I decided that I’d like to port it to a compiled language. My plans are to use the CMOC compiler and write the port in C.

Not wanting to get the cart before the horse I decided that I should first learn how the game engine worked without wrestling with a language I have little experience with so I am going to port the game engine to C# first and then use what I learn from that process to then port the code to something that can be compiled with CMOC.

I am also hoping to give periodic updates on the blog regarding my progress and anything interesting I’ve learned along the way.