People mod games all the time, but it’s not every day someone mods Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80. [Nick Bild] did exactly that, adding joystick support and a couple DOOM-inspired monsters for good measure. And while he was at it, optional unlimited player health and power because why not?
Dungeons of Daggorath was pretty unusual for its time. It portrayed a dungeon and its contents from a first-person perspective, and events progressed in real time.
Gameplay-wise, most commands entered by the player revolved around moving around and attacking monsters, and that was done with text commands like ATTACK RIGHT which could mercifully be shortened to A R. Still, not the most efficient control scheme.
[Nick] downloaded the original source code and made several modifications. A joystick moves the player much more efficiently, with the button acting as a shortcut to attacking with whatever is in the player’s right hand. He also replaced the spider and viper enemies with creatures inspired by DOOM‘s imp and cacodemon monsters, as well as the aforementioned optional limitless health and power.
[Nick] dubbed the modified game Dungeons of Doom and while the terms of the original don’t allow redistribution of modified code, his changes are simple enough to follow. Especially so for those from the generation that remembers typing programs in by hand from a magazine page.
“The TRS-80” is a reference to the TRS-80 Model 1, which isn’t the case here. This is for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The screenshots resembled an Apple ][ screen, which confused me a bit.
Ah, okay. Knew something was funny with the screenshot. If that’s the CoCo it makes more sense.
Huge Coco and Tandy fan here. Given that Daggorath was originally released for the model 1 and how Radio Shack originally marketed it as the Trs-80 color computer (before it was the Tandy color computer), I think some confusion is ok. Source- currently looking at my coco2 which has a prominent TRS-80 badge
I played Z-Machine games for a while. They were really fun. I tried getting into visual novels, and they are also very fun, although I can find English translated ones (my Japanese knowledge is not good) but only after a fair bit of effort and by downloading patches from suspicious forums.
Text based games are underrated. They can be very fun. With LLMs, I guess sky’s the limit.