sev- / recomprehend

Open source implementation of the Comprehend adventure game engine used by the games Transylvania, Crimson Crown, and Oo-Topos

Re-Comprehend

Re-Comprehend is an implementation of the Comprehend/Graphics Magician engines used to implement the following Penguin Software games:

• Transylvania
• Crimson Crown
• OO-Topos
• Talisman, Challenging the Sands of Time (not currently working)

A history of Penguin Software, the Comprehend engine and the Graphics Magician software can be found here:

• www.filfre.net/2014/06/comprehend/
• graphicsmagician.com/polarware/compadv.htm

License

Re-Comprehend is public domain. The code may be freely incorporated into other projects, either source or binary.

Building Re-Comprehend

Re-Comprehend requires LibSDL2. Building has only been tested on Linux, but it should be trivially portable to other operating systems.

To build:

make

Playing the Games

To play the games you need a copy of the original DOS version of the game. To my knowledge all of the games are now abandon-ware (the are available for download from the Graphics Magician website).

To run a game, start Re-Comprehend with the short code for the game and the path to copy of the original game. For example:

./recomprehend tr /local/games/dosbox/transylvania

To see a list of options and the supported games:

./recomprehend --help

Note the some of the games require knowledge from the manuals distributed with the original games in order to succesfully complete them.

To quit Re-Comprehend type "!quit" at the game prompt.

Save and Restore

Saving and restoring is implemented in all the games using the original file format to maintain backwards compatibility. The "save" and "restore" commands in Re-Comprehend will save or restore from the original game directory passed on the command line.

Debugging

Re-Comprehend provides support for debugging the games. Command line options are provided (see --help) for dumping human readable game data. When playing debug commands can be entered by prefixing them with a "!" character. The following debug commands are supported:

• debug: Toggle debug mode. When debug mode is enabled verbose debugging of functions will be printed.
• dump objects: Dump information about that current state of all objects in the game.
• dump rooms: Dump information about the current state of all rooms in the game.
• dump state: Dump information about the current game state.