MMmmm...infocom...  Strange that this should come up, as I've been diving
back into nostalgia of late, digging up my old Infocom games and replaying
them (on my Palm III, no less). I've been enjoying the heck out of Enchanter
and The Lurking Horror.  I fondly remember my Zork days back in the early
80's. :)

Did Adams do Bureacracy as well as Hitch Hiker's Guide?  I remember playing
that game and thinking "this is pure Douglas Adams"...but I don't remember
him being credited anywhere for it....it was quite a clever, cynical little
game..

If you can find it, the Activision Classic Text Adventure Masterpiece CD
is a real treasure if you like Infocom stuff.  I picked it up years ago...it
seems to be a real collecter's item these days, being sold for insane prices
on E-Bay.

I believe last week slashdot.org had a link to an interview with Dave Lebling
(co-author of Zork, author of Enchanter and so much more).  Made for some
really interesting reading...



On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 01:11:11PM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> >
> >Wouldn't it be nice to combine the power of Squeak with this virtual
> >Z-machine?
> 
> Yes it would! Any volunteers to do the port? Should be "pretty easy" .....
> 
> P.S. My friend Douglas Adams did perhaps the tour de force Infocom 
> game. It would be nice to bring this back to life in his memory.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> 
> At 8:17 PM +0200 7/29/01, G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:
> >RPG: RolePlayGame or IF: InteractiveFiction... It has a long history, going
> >back to the 80-s (The days of Apple-II and Tandy model-I and even before
> >that: a good overview of the history and the diverse programs of the past
> >and present is available at:
> >
> >ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/
> >
> >Core of these programs is handling natural language, placed in
> >fantasy-settings: "You are in a dark wood, at your left you see an old
> >house, on your right you hear a waterfall.. what will you do next?
> >
> >My favorite is: Inform, also documented at:
> >
> >http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform/index.html
> >
> >Because is has this same platform-independancy of a virtual machine I also
> >like in Smalltalk & Squeak:
> >
> >"....The Z-machine is an imaginary computer, created in 1979, which has
> >never existed as circuitry. Instead, almost every real computer built in the
> >1980s and 1990s has been taught to pretend to be a Z-machine. The usefulness
> >of this is that Inform's story files (the actual games which players play)
> >run on the Z-machine, so it follows that a Z-machine interpreter is just
> >what you need to play Inform games. The Z-machine was invented by Joel
> >Berez, Marc Blank and others working at the Infocom corporation, so it also
> >runs Infocom's justly famous works of interactive fiction...."
> >
> >There are also trials of combining the language parser with sound & graphic
> >scenes....
> >
> >Wouldn't it be nice to combine the power of Squeak with this virtual
> >Z-machine?
> >
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Richard Clemens [mailto:clemens at wvwc.edu]
> >Sent: zondag 29 juli 2001 14:54
> >To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> >Subject: Re: Developing RPG (Tile-based graphics with transparency)
> >
> >
> >>  I don't know what an RPG is
> >
> >Or an old "programming language."  Actually more accurately a set of coding
> >sheets that allows the "easy" creation of reports from data files.  Used
> >many of the same terms/concepts as COBOL but without the ability to do much
> >real "coding."  A later version was called RPG II.
> 
> 
> -- 
>