The BDB Project
The Past
In the late 1980s, one of the most prolific text adventure authors in the world was Bonaventura Di Bello. He initially ported the adventures written by Roberto Tabacco from the Commodore 64 to the ZX Spectrum 48k. These were published monthly in Epic 3000 from May 1986 to November 1986.
He then wrote three adventures per issue for Explorer, which was published by Edizioni Hobby from November 1986 to November 1987. These were written for the Commodore 64 using The Quill and Illustrator. They could also be played on the MSX using a program that interpreted the Quill data.
Finally, he wrote three adventures per issue for Viking Adventures in Italiano, which was published by Edizioni Hobby from January 1987 to December 1987. These were again written with The Quill and Illustrator for the Commodore 64, but they were also ported to the ZX Spectrum.
All in all, Bonaventura Di Bello wrote 69 original games for the Commodore 64 (plus MSX or ZX Spectrum) and one game for the ZX Spectrum that was published in Load'n'Run in April 1987. These games were all written in Italian and have never been translated to English.
The Present
In August 2024, Gianluca Girelli contacted Bonaventura Di Bello and asked for permission to translate his 35-year-old games to English and bring them up to date for a modern audience. BDB was thrilled to think that people were still interested in his old games and gave him permission to proceed.
Gianluca started on the first game, then enlisted the help of Garry Francis and The BDB Project was born. It's a very ambitious project that may take years to complete.
Over a period of six months, Garry used UnQuill to extract all the Quill data from the C64 tape images, removed any unnecessary data, manually reformatted it and translated all the strings from Italian to English using Google Translate. He then copied all the 4-character vocabulary words into a Word document and painstakingly translated these to English with help from Gianluca. Once he had the translation tables, he was able to translate the vocabulary in UnQuill's CondActs tables, draw maps in Trizbort and create an Inform 6 skeleton for each game. He also OCRed the articles and solutions from the original magazines, painstakingly checked and corrected the typos, then translated these to English using Google Translate.
After 6 months, the team had UnQuill data, translation tables, articles, walkthroughs, maps and Inform 6 skeletons for all 70 games. They then started on the painstaking task of reverse engineering the UnQuill data for all the games.
The aim of the project is not only to translate the games to English, but bring them up-to-date for a modern audience. This means removing most of the sudden death, guess-the-verb, tight inventory limits, mazes, unwinnable situations and moon logic that was prevalent in the games of the 1980s, and introducing a friendlier parser with multi-word input, extended vocabulary, richer descriptions and more responses. In some cases, there are enhancements to the puzzles and/or extra puzzles.
The games are being written in Inform 6 using the PunyInform library and will be published here on an irregular basis as time permits. Follow us to get notified of new releases.
Bonaventura, Gianluca and Garry hope you enjoy this blast from the past.
