I played a ton of Apple games in junior high, I think Choplifter was my favorite, looks like Taipan was created around the same time but unfortunately I don’t think my school had it. Simon Jansen sent in this hack where he made a version of the Taipan game that runs on 2 Adruino boards. Two Arduinos (that talk to each other) were used because a single Arduino would not have the power to run the game. As you can imagine this game requires a ton of strings to be displayed on the screen and text chews up memory space in a hurry. Because of this there is a lookup table that is used to index strings that are being stored on an external EEPROM. The game display is a small backup camera and looks right at home in the 1st edition of the Taipan book that was used as the game case.
If you are interested in making your own Simon has provided the source code on this page.
“Gameplay is exactly like the original Apple 2 version, right down to the ‘bugs’. I did need to rearrange the screens somewhat due to a smaller resolution than the original version but all the information is present and all the strings are exactly as in the original (with the exception of minor changes).
The whole game is contained inside a housing made from a hard cover copy of the original Tai-Pan book (first edition too)! It contains 8 AA Ni-MH cells to power both the screen and the Arduinos. A recharging socket is included on the main panel.”
