The Search for Almazar

Winston M. Llamas wrote "The Search for Almazar" sometime between 1980 and 1983, while he was an undergraduate computer science student at Rensselaer Polytechnic (RPI). The game was written in BASIC, and apparently ran on RPI's mainframe, alongside Crowther & Woods' Adventure and Holtzman & Kershenblatt's Castlequest.

In 1983, Llamas submitted a version of his game to 80 Micro magazine, with instructions for running it on the TRS-80 Model I or TRS-80 Model III. A few months later, the game appeared in the SIG/M software library, as ported for the Osborne 1 by Bob Liddelow. Liddelow had abridged some messages to make them fit on the Osborne's narrower screen, and removed all the short room descriptions.

This particular version of "Almazar" was written by Arthur O'Dwyer in C, mostly following the Liddelow version (because it was machine-readable), but consulting the 80 Micro version whenever a bit looked particularly tricky. (Or buggy. Liddelow introduced at least eight typos, three or four of which were on the game-winning path.) The ad-hoc messages, long and short room descriptions, object descriptions, and help text were all taken from the 80 Micro version and then edited for grammar. The intent is to be basically faithful to the intended behavior of the original game.