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Dec	APR	May
	17
2008	2010	2011

123 captures

27 Apr 1999 - 23 Aug 2010

About this capture

Planet of Death is the name of the first text-only adventure game by Artic Computing. It was released in around 1981 for the Sinclair ZX81, and may also have been available for the ZX80. It was the first of a series of adventure games which also included Inca Curse, Ship of Doom and Espionage Island. When the ZX Spectrum was launched in 1982, Artic quickly converted the games to work with the new machine.

The author of the early Artic adventures is not named on-screen. However, some later adventure games were produced by the company which were written by Simon Wadsworth, so perhaps he wrote Planet of Death as well.

In this adventure, you find yourself stranded on an alien planet. Your aim is to escape from this planet, by finding your (now captured and disabled) space ship. You will meet various hazards and dangers, some natural, some not, all of which you must overcome to succeed.

The ZX Spectrum version contains at least two bugs, not including the rather bizarre spelling and punctuation! Neither bug prevents completion of the game. The first bug is that to break the stalactites in the cave, one must use the block of ice. However, it is impossible to bring the ice into this cave. The stones seem to serve no purpose - perhaps they were intended for this purpose? The second bug is that to avoid being infected by the Little Green Man, it is necessary to not wear the gloves! The third bug is that, once infected, the code which kills you after ten moves does not fire.

I have disassembled the ZX Spectrum version and provided an annotated listing for you to download. This can be assembled to produce, byte for byte, an exact copy of the original game. By making a very small number of modifications, I was able to get this running under CP/M. The CP/M version contains fixes for the bugs listed above, but does not include the Save/Restore Game option. I have also translated the original Z80 instructions into ANSI C, although the results are far from beautiful! The use of the getch() function may need to be altered for your compiler. I compiled it for Windows 95 using Visual C++ 5.0 and it runs fine. I have also compiled it using gcc so it should run under UNIX too. Feel free to use the code on this site to produce your own versions of the game. How about a new graphical user interface?

ZX Spectrum Version

adv_a.asm (disassembly)

adv_a.z80 (snapshot)

New! CP/M port (includes bug fixes)

adv_a.asm (disassembly)

adv_a.com (executable)

New! Translation to C

adv_a.c ("generic" C port)

adv_a.exe (WIN32 console app)