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Pieces of Eight 1986
- Year
- 1986
- Machine
- Apple II
- For
- Queensland Department of Education, produced with Jacaranda Software
- Written in
- 6502, with an Applesoft program to load it
Paul Holland's text adventure on a pirate island: one day to find the treasure, take some of it to show the crew, and light a signal fire on the lookout before nightfall. Mark created the graphics for every version. Gold Medallion, Australian Society for Educational Technology, 1986.
An island on one floppy
Pieces of Eight is an illustrated adventure on one 140K Apple II disk. Its 21K of text is packed five bits a character, so eight characters fit in five bytes: as plain bytes it would be 34K. Its map, a hi-res screen of 8,192 bytes, is packed into 3,881, and its pictures, 8,184 bytes each, are loaded from the disk only at the moments that matter.
Its loader says: LOADING TIME 80 SECONDS.
Who made it
Paul Holland
Designer: the game, its text and its logic, and the teacher's guide
Geoff Body
Programmer, the Apple II version
David Smith
The sentence parser, at Jacaranda Software
Mark Wharton
The computer graphics for every version, among them the scenes of the game's endings; and the programming of the Commodore 64 version, 1988
Queensland Department of Education
Publisher, through its Production Services; on the credits card, "(c) Department of Education, Queensland, 1986"
Jacaranda Software
Producer
From the archive
On cartridge paper with Rotring pens and coloured pencil: the island the game was made from.