DETECTIVE STORY: tweaked French version and brand-new English version!

[retroric]

Dear Oric fans,

As a (late!!) celebration of the special month of 'Orictober' I thought I'd bring a special treat (well, let's call it a Hallowen treat now then !!) to non French-speaking Oric users who may have missed on one of the greatest jewels (in my view) in the Oric game library: DETECTIVE STORY.
https://www.oric.org/software/detective_story-1363.html

This is a really fantastic and well-designed criminal investigation game that I always found very absorbing and addictive, and may be particularly appealing to those amongst you who liked to play "Cluedo" as kids, because although the game mechanics is radically different and single-player only, for me it conveys the same atmosphere and excitation.

Although only ranked 70th on Orics.org's top 150 games (https://www.oric.org/?page=software&fille=top150games), it is definitely a game really worth trying. Also, I find it was quite a technical feat then, considering the complexity that lays behind its apparent simplicity. Finally, the beauty of the text-only graphics (with character redefinition and judicious choice of colours to convey a mysterious and dark atmosphere) has to be noted.

However its seems the version published on Oric.org has quite a few tape transfer errors (and 'original' bugs too that sometimes caused the game to crash), and it really first began for me as a simple exercise of hunting and fixing these little bugs and transfer errors. I annotated all corrections (hopefully) in REMarks in the code with a special [retroric] 'tag' to allow these changes to be easily found and reviewed. So the first objective really was to release an improved, bug-free French version as a treat for French-speaking members of the community.

I then realised it was really a pity that non-French speakers would miss on such a game, and therefore endeavoured to translate it to English. It was not such an easy task as I first thought, because as I delved into the code and inner workings of the game I had to deal with some language/syntax intricacies and differences between French in English and there was also quite a lot of vocabulary to translate/adapt.

You can find the French and English versions here (both in source and .tap form) on my Github account in this repository:
https://github.com/retroric/detective-story-tweaked

If you do not have a Github account you can still browse and download the files individually (using right click, "Save as..." option). Alternatively you can navigate to https://github.com/retroric/detective-s ... es/tag/1.0 and click on the "Source code (zip" to download everything as a ZIP file.

Bear in mind this is still a work in progress that may still need some ironing out but I thought I'd really release it now otherwise knowing myself I may never release it in my lifetime...
Also, since it's almost 40 years since the game was originally published in 1985 I thought it was really high time it started its new international career!

The French and English versions should run flawlessly now, but there is always the possibility of special combinations that would cause crashes, so if you do run into bugs please report them in this thread or on Github. Again, this is still a work in progress so don't hesitate to give me feedback if you find anything that needs correcting/improving, both in the French or English versions.
Also, bear in mind I am a non-native English speaker so you may find parts of the translation to be incorrect or maybe just worth improving, so please don't hesitate to report inaccuracies or suggestions for improvement, I will be very happy to receive your feedback.

I really hope this post will encourage a lot of people here to try this game and hopefully enjoy it… If you do I would be really glad to have your impressions.

Finally I intend to write an article for the CEO magazine about my work on this game, sharing some technical aspects and focusing on some language differences that I had to deal with in the process of translating the game to English.

Speaking of the CEO magazine, long after I started this 'journey' into translating this game I stumbled into a very interesting article published in issue #220 (August 2008) of the magazine, pp. 43-49, explaining quite a few things about this game I had not seen myself. For CEO members this really is a worth read as it gives very interesting details about the structure of the game, and some cheating hints too. This article also helped me correct a bug that escaped me with certain names that needed shortening to avoid certain combinations causing the game to crash...

Belated wishes to all for a happy Orictober and a happy Halloween too !

Again, you can find the tweaked version of Detective Story here: https://github.com/retroric/detective-story-tweaked

Cheers !

EDIT: if playing on emulation with Oricutron, you may want to change emulation speed to 4 or 8 MHz (right-click in Oricutron window then choose 'Overclock options...'). This will greatly speed up the initialization part of the game, and won't affect the speed of the actual game (esp. it won't affect the speed of the text 'typewriting scrolling' effect).

[Dbug]

I agree that Detective Story is a very good game, I played it quite a lot back then.
I specially like how it managed to convey the "noir" ambiance with a very simple set of characters immediately looking obviously like sky scrappers at night.

Very good design!

[Symoon]

I recently got the original tape of this game.
If the tape is in good shape, I'll make a tranfer of it, hopefully without transfer errors.
But not sure when I can (currently too busy and far away from my Oric stock!)

[retroric]

Hi Symoon,
Yes that would be nice if you could, I'd be interested to compare your version with the one on Oric.org that was transferred by Musepat.
No hurry of course... I think I've had this project lay around for more like 4 years, maybe I started it even earlier, I'm awfully good at procrastination unfortunately, one of my worst defects... This is why I just kicked myself in the butt to release this more on less on time...

[Dom]

Speaking of the CEO magazine, long after I started this 'journey' into translating this game I stumbled into a very interesting article published in issue #220 (August 2008) of the magazine,... ... For CEO members this really is a worth read ...

Thanks to retroric for noticing and appreciating this article.
As the author of the article I am happy to share it with non-CEO members.

[ibisum]

Any chance of an English translation?

Edit: I'm a dufus, I didn't see the full details.. "You get a smooth, uneventful ride..."

[retroric]

Ah, thank you very much @Dom for coming forward and sharing your article with the community ! I was wondering indeed who was the author as there was no name mentioned! I should have guessed it was you though, the master of game walkthroughs! Excellent work as usual, it was very useful although I stumbled on it a bit late.

Speaking of names, I forgot to mention the author of Detective Story is known as "DUC" (as can be seen in the first screenshot on the Oric.org page for the game, probably taken from the intro .tap that is not included), but I have no other information (other than the game being published by No Man's Land).

Now @ibisum, I won't speak for Dom but if he doesn't have the time to do the translation or needs any hand I would be glad of course to help!

[Dom]

I won't speak for Dom but if he doesn't have the time to do the translation or needs any hand I would be glad of course to help!

Thank you Laurent, for your translation proposal.
It's a relief because I didn't really feel like I could translate this text correctly. In addition, you are probably in the best position to translate this article as a large part of the sentences in this article come directly from the French BASIC listing and you have already translated all of these sentences. So the vocabulary used in the translated article will have a much better chance of being strictly identical to the one you used in the game.

[coolman66]

Brilliant great game in English from across the channel !

[retroric]

I won't speak for Dom but if he doesn't have the time to do the translation or needs any hand I would be glad of course to help!

Thank you Laurent, for your translation proposal.
It's a relief because I didn't really feel like I could translate this text correctly. In addition, you are probably in the best position to translate this article as a large part of the sentences in this article come directly from the French BASIC listing and you have already translated all of these sentences. So the vocabulary used in the translated article will have a much better chance of being strictly identical to the one you used in the game.

Well, my pleasure Dom and a honour really if you will allow me to translate your article! However, in order to do so it would greatly help me if you could send me the original (Microsoft Word ?) editable document as there are a lot of tables and other layouts in your article so it would be much easier if I used the same template. So if you could please send it to me at retroric48K_at_yahoo_fr I would be very grateful
Then once I'm done I'll send you the translated version and you can use it as you want, it remains *your* article of course!

[coco.oric]

Finally I intend to write an article for the CEO magazine about my work on this game, sharing some technical aspects and focusing on some language differences that I had to deal with in the process of translating the game to English.

Hi, thanks a lot for sharing this software and digging up the source code. Your article will be appreciated..

[Symoon]

By the way, I updated Oric.org with a transfer I mande from Jean's tape in... 2006!
I don't guarantee it's a 100% error-free transfer, but no errors were detected back then. You can check if it's better than the previous one!

The Intro has been added - actually it was already there, in the "stuff" section, not sure why. Can't delete it there sadly.

[ibisum]

Having played it a bit now, I'm really enjoying it .. Only issue is the whole (T)ake/(D)rop interface was confusing and I ended up driving all over town until I realized how to 'input' take/drop instructions .. and it would be cool if it were possible to interrupt the text with a keypress, when you know what you wanna do next ..

[retroric]

By the way, I updated Oric.org with a transfer I mande from Jean's tape in... 2006!
I don't guarantee it's a 100% error-free transfer, but no errors were detected back then. You can check if it's better than the previous one!
The Intro has been added - actually it was already there, in the "stuff" section, not sure why. Can't delete it there sadly.

Many thanks Symoon !!
I'm going to download the new .tap and convert it to .bas then check with my version and correct what needs to.
Also, I'll convert the intro .tap to English too !

[retroric]

REMAINING BUGS IN v1.0:

• I missed a small typo in the English translation "SUBJET" instead of "SUBJECT" ("OF THE INTERVIEW") -- just saw it yesterday, doesn't affect the game but will correct it ASAP
• be aware also there is still a nasty remaining bug I thought I corrected but that's still occuring sometimes with specific combinations of characters and situations. This causes the game to crash with an ILLEGAL QTY ERROR IN 1230
  So if this happens to you during a game, very sorry about that but I'm afraid you'll have to start over...
  I'm working on correcting it, I think it also has to do with a weird Oric-1/Atmos check and value setting for 'AX' variable on line 40. I reckon that this bug might not happen when playing in Oric-1 mode but I'll have to do further analysis anyway to fully understand and correct the code to prevent this error from hppening.