TREASURE HUNT

In researching the history of "Hunt the Wumpus" I learned of a similar game, written by Lance Micklus in 1978 called "Treasure Hunt", who also wrote the more widely known game "Dog Star Adventure". I was able to find a .BAS file on classicmp.org containing the original source code for "Treasure Hunt" in TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC. Because Lance had commented the code so clearly, it took only two days of work to rewrite the game in C, test it, and add some additional features such as the ability to save and restore the game. Now my students and I can play "Treasure Hunt" on the Raspberry Pi in our classroom!

(Treasure Hunt running in TRS-32)
(Meeting Lance Micklus)
I actually had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Micklus at Tandy Assembly in Chilicothe, OH, in 2017. The picture above shows him giving me a CoCo2 (The box says CoCo 3) he was looking to pass on to someone who would appreciate it. He even autographed it for me, and it has since become my testing machine for cartridge development. I've since upgraded it with a CoCo VGA adapter so my students can play games on it using a modern monitor.

The game map is 95 rooms and is fixed in layout, which is substantially larger than standard dodecahedral Wumpus maze. Fortunately, Jason Dyer, has an excellent write up of the game and mapped out the cave connections on his blog.Renga in Blue. His map is shown here.

Jason Dyer's map of Treaure Hunt

If you would like to play Treasure Hunt yourself on a Linux system or on Windows under cygwin, you can download the source code from github and build it using make. The repository includes the original BASIC source code (by permission from Lance!)

If you would like to play Treasure Hunt in an emulator such as TRS-32, create a DSK image using TRS-Tools and attach thnt.bas to it. Start BASIC then enter the command, LOAD "THNT/BAS", followed by "RUN".

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