December 2023 - Apple II version by Antoine Vignau & Olivier Zardini.

Le manoir du Dr Genius
The Manor of Dr Genius
(c) 1983, Laurent Benes & Loriciels

What is Le manoir du Dr Genius?

The original game was written by Laurent Benes. Le manoir du Dr Genius was published by the brand new software game company Loriciels in 1983 for the Oric computer. The engine is an evolution of the adventure engine published in The ZX81 pocket book book published in 1981, and translated into French, and later published by PSI in 1983. Laurent Benes upgraded the engine by adding commands, and also made it graphical. It was one of the earliest, if not the first, title of that sort for the Oric computer.

We wanted to port it to the Apple II as the platform lacks so many interesting French games of that era. We even made an English port. We recently met Laurant Weill, the co-founder of Loriciels, and Laurent Benes. We got their authorization to release the Apple II version, and we thank them a lot. We also thank Fred_72 who originally provided the BASIC source code of the Oric version, as well as his VG5000 version. We made it in assembly, as usual :-)

How to play?

Enter one or two word commands (eg. OPEN CLOSET, NORTH) and press return. If the command is recognized, the game engine will act accordingly. If you are stuck, please refer to the manual which contains the solution.
If you press return directly, the game will switch on/off the four bottom text lines.

Some commands were added to the Apple II version:

  • CASSE (EN: CASE) to switch between lower- and -upper case chars display,
  • QUITTER (EN: QUIT) to return to your preferred launcher,
  • TEMPO (EN: TEMPO) to enable/disable game tempo routines.





Download:

.po disk image (143k, French)

.po disk image (143k, English)
Manual:

Source code: