I think it's a pretty cool idea. I think what you're thinking of is turning it into a CLI/DOS sort of game or something, correct? At least, that's what I think of when you mean games that old. Something very old like Nethack/ADOM. I have a pretty bad attention span so I don't know if I'll run with this learning opportunity, but I like the idea. Gonna toss it on the study list.
Not a dev for this game either btw just a driveby commenter.
Yeah. I was mainly thinking CLI. There aren't that many graphics, so colored text would be all that's needed, and the game can use keyboard navigation.
Ctrl + Z could even function as a way to undo an action similar to such a thing already being possible in this game.
And if I do this, I fix a problem that plagued many text-based interactive fiction games on home computers. That massive problem being that you had to type in the general idea of what exactly you were trying to do. I will instead program in a system that is already in this game, all possible actions are displayed in a list, and pressing 0 - F on the keyboard will do the selected action on that list. This is much better than you have to guess what to type after "What do you do?"
However, this game features one thing not present in many of the early text-based interactive fiction games, character creation and character/world generation. Every playthrough of this game is unique, and trying to run this type of world generation on an Intel 8088 CPU could take a very long time. Furthermore, RAM will be limited to 640 KB, assuming the user even has that much (the IBM PC can have as little as 1/10 of that amount).
While there aren't many graphics, there are three major ones, the banner, and the two maps, the campus and the town. If the game runs in text mode, I cannot display these maps (in an acceptable way). I may have to implement a system to switch between text mode and graphics mode, or just run the entire game in graphics mode (which makes it much slower on the oldest processors).
