Here are two of my favorite character based computer games:
Adventure also known as The Colossal Cave Adventure. I spent the good part of one summer in college trying to get to the end of the game. Having the Fortran source code helped achieve that goal!
Here's a link to various sources and executables for the program. I don't know if I would trust an executable. Actually the Linux executables probably won't work because the PI is ARM based! Perhaps you can get one of the several C sources listed to compile.
Update: I downloaded this version and it compiled with only a few warnings on the Pi. I'm currently using Raspbmc so I had to apt-get install gcc to get gcc installed. The resulting executable worked perfectly. Here's another web site with more information on the game and some maps and walkthroughs to help get you started playing the game.
pi@raspbmc:~/adv4_src$ ./adventure4
[A-code kernel version 10.05; MLA, 01 Apr 94]
Welcome to Adventure4+ [660 point MLA version 10.06 - 26 Jul 95]
Would you like instructions?
Another favorite of mine is the Eliza program that pretends to be a psychotherapist. There is a Java version available here and these instructions show how to install an ARM JRE on the PI. The Java version of Eliza is an applet, but with the provided source code it shouldn't be too difficult to convert the applet to run as a console application reading and writing to the Console.
Here is a patch for the Eliza source listed above that enables it to run interactively in a shell. This patch is for ElizaMain.java:
349c349,350
< in = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(test));
---
> // in = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(test));
> in = new DataInputStream( System.in );
353c354
< System.out.println(">> " + s);
---
> // System.out.println(">> " + s);
355c356
< System.out.println(reply);
---
> System.out.println(">> " + reply);
To run the program you need to have the script file in the current working directory when you invoke java to run the program. Since this Java code is in package Eliza you need to put all of the class files into a directory called Eliza. If that directory is then in a directory called bin in your working directory you can run the program by executing the following command assuming that the java executable is in your path:
pi$ java -cp bin Eliza.ElizaApp
>> How do you do. Please state your problem.
I am depressed
>> I am sorry to hear that you are depressed.
Thank you
>> We were discussing you -- not me.
bye
>> Goodbye. It was nice talking to you.
Java Update: Wow, running Java on the Pi isn't as easy as I thought! The good new is that there is an Oracle Java SE embeded version available, but it doesn't support hard floating point, which most of the Pi distributions are built to use. If you want to run Oracle's JVM which supports JIT you have to use Debian Squeeze.
Another option for Java on the PI is OpenJDK, but it doesn't include JIT. However, the Debian openjdk-6-jdk package also installs icedtea-6-jre-cacao which does include JIT. See this forum post for more details on Java options for the Pi.
