Technology
Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of FORTRAN code (see the original source code), with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10 timesharing computer. The data included text for 79 map locations, 193 vocabulary words, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. On the PDP-10, the program loads and executes with all its game data in memory. It required about 60k words (nearly 300kB) of core memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128k words.
Woods also developed his game in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 (see the source code). His work expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3000 lines of code, and 1800 lines of data. The data consisted of 140 map locations, 293 vocabulary words, 53 objects, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. Like Crowther's original game, Woods' game also executes with all its data in memory, but required somewhat less core memory (42k words) than Crowther's game.
The Adventure FORTRAN code took full advantage of the machine-dependent 36-bit architecture of the PDP-10. Each PDP-10 word (an integer) packed five 7-bit ASCII characters in the high order 35 bits of a 36-bit word. And programmers could compare integers in FORTRAN directly with five character strings. This architecture was evident to the game player too, since the game only distinguished the first five characters of all the vocabulary words it understood. One feature of the PDP-10 operating system was its ability to save, restore, and restart execution of a program's core memory image, even after a program terminates. This feature was the original basis for saving, or suspending, an adventure game. Suspending a game in this manner saved an entire copy of the game program to disk, rather than just player specific data. These PDP-10 machine dependencies made porting of the Crowther/Woods Adventure to other platforms more difficult.
Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine.
Read more about this topic: Colossal Cave Adventure
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