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              Welcome to the home page of The Planet of Death.

             PC (Win32) Conversion now available for download!



                                Some History

 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

 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.



                                Instructions

 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.



                      Bugs in the ZX Spectrum version

   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.



                        New Ports of Planet of Death

   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?



                                 Downloads

   ZX Spectrum Version         New! CP/M port       New! Translation to C
                            (includes bug fixes)
        adv_a.asm                                   adv_a.c ("generic" C
      (disassembly)              adv_a.asm                  port)
                               (disassembly)
   adv_a.z80 (snapshot)                               adv_a.exe (WIN32
                           adv_a.com (executable)       console app)



                                   Links

          The Spectrum Adventurer - Artic includes game solutions!

         Many more remakes of old games maintained by Borgar Waade

                       Jet Set Willy for the Atari ST

                  My homepage for a list of my other sites



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        Site maintained by Paul Taylor. Last update: 24 August 1998
