Re: The 1st Annual 1-2K Text Adventure Competition

[adam@fsf.net (Adam Thornton)]

In article <40E599FF.3070502@spamgourmet.com>,
Nele Abels  <nele.abels@t-online.de> wrote:
>Adam Thornton schrieb:
>[...]
> > Scott Adams games actually only need a few dozen bytes of RAM.  Most
>of the game
> > (16K in the classical games) is ROM.
>
>Huh? What do you mean with that? The original Scott Adams games which I ran
>on my original TRS-80 Model I required 16KB of RAM. Are you perhaps talking
>about game cartridges for the CoCo? The games originally came on tape. The
>interpreter itself takes only couple of KB, the databases normally are about
>12KB lare.

That's what I mean: the actual volatile data in the game is very, very
small (look at Alan Cox's "ScottFree" interpreter, for instance).

In a design where you can map new ROM into the memory map--by a
cartridge, most commonly, then you only need a very small amount of RAM
to play the game.  Obviously if you're loading the game from tape or
disk, you need somewhere for the nonvolatile data to go as well.

Adam