Two days to the race

Two days to the race is an interactive fiction game developed by Davide Bucci in 2018-2021 with the Adventure Writing System. The gameplay takes place in a somewhat steampunk Turin at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The version for the C64 has been obtained with my aws2c converter and then compiled with Cc65. To run the game (distributed as a "PRG" file), you can use an emulator such as VICE x64, you have to click and drag the file on the emulator. With something like the iec2sd you can also test it on the real hardware, if you have it.

The version for MS-DOS machines has been compiled with Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for MS-DOS and tested with DOSbox. There is almost no difference in the source code, apart the configuration code for colours etc. Gosh... I love the C language! I tried the game with an Olivetti M200 with MS-DOS 3.30 and it worked fine. If you don't see colors in the MS-DOS version and you see plenty of strange things, please read the important notes below. I even compiled a version for the venerable Olivetti M20 with the PCOS operating system, for the RC2014 and for the Commander X16.

Your name is Emilia Vittorini, You're the daughter of Augusto Vittorini, who founded the Industria Torinese Automobili (ITA) with his brother Tullio. Your father is abroad trying to raise funds, but something went wrong and you heard your uncle coming back slamming the door. Your mission is to find what happened and how you can help your family. I will be your ears and eyes. Good luck.

An interactive fiction game is based on commands typed in a relatively natural language. Here are some hints:

look: describe again the location where the player is present
examine object: describe the specified object
north or n or go to north: moves to the north, if possible. Other directions are s, e, w, up, down.
The command bye allows to exit from the game and restart well... it restarts it. You can take objects that you "notice" and you can have a list of carried objects with inventory.

You can finish the game without using the verb use. On this, TDTTR is similar on many classic text adventure games. If you are stuck somewhere and you notice you absolutely want to use something, try to reformulate your sentence with another verb.

The following abbreviations are available:

• l for look
• x or ex for examine
• i or inve or inven for inventory

The game is divided in parts. When you complete one of them, you will get a code that allows to immediately jump to the beginning of the next part. Write down that to resume the game in the future.

It is not possible to save or load the game, so passwords are important. Let me know about typos, errors and bugs in the game!

I drawn some artwork for the game and I really enjoyed crafting the load screen for the C64 and for CGA MS-DOS. I learnt to appreciate the C64 colour palette, by the way. I've been puzzled by the absence of saturated colours such as a bright red, but I understood that it allows to blend beautifully colours together and it's really useful (figure 7 or video 1). I have also been pleased of the results I got with CGA graphics (figure 8) and with the classic "cold" palette i.e. black, cyan, magenta and white. It has been really fun to draw with those constraints!

By the way, the C64 loader recognizes automatically from which device it has been loaded and continues loading from it. I have a C128D with an internal floppy that is device 8 and a SD2IEC that is device 9. It is frustrating to see how many loaders (even for games developed recently) only load from device 8. They give me an error if I try to use them with my SD2IEC!

Inform is a great program, used by many interactive fiction enthusiasts to write their games, setting the golden standard for interactive fiction in 2019. If you know it, you may reasonably be wondering why I decided not to use this tool.

What I wanted to do was to write a game for severely constrained machines such as the Commodore 64. It is true that I could have devoted myself fully to the story and the gameplay using a more advanced tool instead of starting almost from scratch. However, as I enjoy coding, putting together the tools was an integral part of the pleasure I enjoyed crafting the game. I would probably never have written anything, if I could only use Inform.

If you played the game and you are still dubious, I will not be offended by your criticism, I am sure that things can always be done in a better way. Just please keep in mind the goal that was to write a game that could be fully loaded and played by a standard C64. Moreover, a z-machine interpreter is not available on some platforms for which Two Day to the Race exist, such as the RC2014 or the Olivetti M20.

If you have played at least version 1.4 of the game and you have finished it, send me (privately) the final code word and I will put your name in the following list. To contact me, feel free to use PM and Twitter (@davbucci), or drop me an email at davbucci at tiscali dot it.

• Marco Fonnesu (with many thanks for the beta testing and improvements suggested)
• Alessio Colopardi (beta testing, translation in Italian language)
• Alberto Z. (beta testing)
• Spectrum Adventurer (beta testing)
• André Luna Leão
• Kweepa (thanks for suggesting many improvements suggested to the English language)
• Pablo Martinez
• Spencer Owen
• Jason Kostempski
• Chris Carter
• Stefan Johansson
• Benedikt Weiß
• Samurai
• George Nakos
• Ian Hamilton
• Gianluca Girelli
• Gregor
• Jonathan George
• Francesco C
• R-Tape

If you are using the MS-DOS version and the game does not show colours and there are strange characters appearing, be sure that you have something like DEVICE=ANSI.SYS or DEVICE=DOS\ANSI.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS file, so that the console can correctly interpret ANSI commands for colours. Microsoft supported ANSI.SYS since MS-DOS 2.0 but for some reasons did not include ANSI support in the Windows console until 2016. If you use Windows console and the game appears as in figure 11, use DOSbox instead!

The versions for the C64, Plus/4 and MS-DOS contain everything in one file, plus in some cases a graphical loader. Versions for ZX Spectrum and VIC-20+24KB split the game in three files. A special version for the VIC-20+32KB contains a 40-column driver that allows to play the game much more comfortably. You can load the appropriate part if you want to jump straight to this part of the game, but you will be asked the corresponding password in order to play it. I included in the compressed archive both TAP versions as well as WAV files. If you use DivMMC Future, there is a minor incompatibility that makes sort that scrambled characters may be shown in the user input (see figure 12). With my DivMMC Future, if I see this I can reset the machine (with the appropriate button on the interface) and type LOAD "". The game will be loaded again and will be working fine. If you load the game using the audio files, you will have to wait a few minutes, but at least you can enjoy the screen of figure 13. In figures 14, 15, 16 and 17 you can see the game running respectively on a VIC20+24K, a VIC20+32K with 40 column, an Olivetti M20 and on a Commander X16. This last computer is being developed in the moment while I am writing those lines by a team headed by David "The 8-bit guy" Murray.

This game is the first interactive fiction game that I write from scratch. The AWS system works well and it is effective: the source is about 78 KB and the result still fits in the 49 KB available for a C executable on the C64.

If you liked this game, check out The Queen's Footsteps, where you play again as Emilia Vittorini.

I also like the main character of the game, Emilia is determined and brave and solves the situation by herself. It has been interesting to create a character like her (I discussed a lot with my partner) and after a while she seemed alive while I was writing. I also really like to use again the Borland Turbo C++ environment, as it was the first serious compiler I used, on which I learnt C and C++ many years ago.

I had some great fun working on the game and I hope you will enjoy it!