Doctor Who

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Contains VMC10.exe
Type CLOAD & hit ENTER then select DRWHO1.C10 in the JimG subdirectory of the Cassette directory. Type RUN...
Windows Application (Windows XP and later) (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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Doctor Who
by James Smith

Science Fiction
1982

(based on 1 rating)
1 review

About the Story

After Dr. Who collected the Key to Time and defeated the Black Guardian, he received many praises and went on to greater things. The Key itself was again broken into its component pieces and scattered throughout the universe...

But the dark forces threaten, and in order to save the universe, the Timelords again need the Key. You have been chosen to go forth and locate it for them. You will be given a TARDIS (rather old and unreliable, but the best available) that has the coordinates of the planets on which the six parts are located pre-programmed into it. By RESETing its controls you can travel between the six planets and Galafry. As usual, the six parts are disguised as other things, and you will have to use your intuition to figure out which is which. (There is a way to tell...)

All the planets are inhabited, and most inhabitants tend to be antisocial. Whether you TALK to them, HIDE from them, kill them, OFFER them gifts of appeasement, or simply ignore them is up to you. Most objects are obvious, but some are hidden and have to be SEARCHed for. Only one key part is on any one planet. Beware the maze on Peladon...

You can use commands of up to 64 characters. The program will ignore any words it doesn't understand. Commands can be one, two or three words long.

When you find all the parts (or think you have), take them back to the throne room on Galafry to win.

Originally published as a type-in program in Micro-80 Magazine (Vol 3. No. 8, July 1982) for the TRS-80 Model 1, it uses a unique multiple file method to allow it to be squeezed into a 16K machine. In the MC-10 version after loading and running the initial program (DRWHO1.C10) you will be prompted to load an additional cassette file (DRWHO2.C10). In the TRS-80 version a special program DRWHO1/BAS must be run first which creates a special file DRWHO/DAT that will be automatically loaded after the second file DRWHO2/BAS is run.

WARNING: This program contains many illogical character movement sequences, which apparently are part of the programmer's attempt to create some of the surreal atmosphere of the original TV series.

Game Details

Language: English (en)
Current Version: 3.1
License: Public Domain
Development System: BASIC
Forgiveness Rating: Cruel
IFID: Unknown
TUID: fokc9i88djcmape

Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 1
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Like the Doctor Himself, Infuriating and Unpredictable, July 20, 2014

by jgerrie (Cape Breton Island, Canada)

Originally written for the TRS-80 Model 1/Dick Smith System 80 and published in an Australian magazine for those machines it can be difficult to get the game running, as many of the disk images out there contain versions of the code set only for cassette use. This is a problem because the program must load a data file before it can run (a space saving technique for systems with only 16K of RAM). The original Cassette based Basic source must therefore be modified for disk use to get it to run on a disk system/emulator. See the following for an archived version of the original Micro-80 magazine article for some help with these issues:
https://archive.org/details/MICRO-80_Vol._3_Issue_08_1982-07_MICRO-80_AU
I have ported a version of this program to TRS-80 MC-10 which avoids this complexity.

The mapping of this program is very odd. Moving is non-logical. Reverse paths don't always take you back the way you came. Paths also double back in all kinds of strange ways that don't make geometric sense either. I originally thought this may have been a programming error on the original author's part (or my own part in porting the code to TRS-80 MC-10) but since playing it to completion (with the help of some excellent materials provided by Alex Dijktra over at solutionarchive) I have come to appreciate how it is actually a clever way to recreate a little bit of the creepy and mysterious atmosphere of the TV series. You won't like this game if you can't get into the spirit of this counter-intuitive navigation.

You also wont like this game unless you're the kind of adventurer who doesn't mind dealing lots of random elements affecting your possibilities of success (in puzzle solving, dealing with the NPCs you meet, as well as other aspects).

There are some unique commands such as: ENTER (takes you into the Tardis)
RESET (moves the Tardis to a new planet). SEARCH can accomplish quite a lot in certain rooms, but it is one of the many elements in the game affected by randomness, so multiple tries are necessary.

There are lots of NPCs in this game in the form of aliens who/that you can interact with in various useful or lethal ways. This is quite rare for Basic IF games under 16K RAM. I have found so few Basic adventures (at least that have easily accessible Basic source code) based on the Doctor Who theme (most Dr. Who adventures seem to be professional machine language affairs), which is part of my own fascination with this game. However, if you are simply a fan of interactive fiction and Doctor Who and not of the history of Basic text adventuring as such, you might want to give this one a miss.