David's web pages

One day there will be something interesting here. Today is not that day, but at least there is a bit more than there used to be...

Text Adventures

Text adventures, or "interactive fiction", are text-based computer games. If you were playing computer games in the late 1970s or 1980s, you might remember games like this (the start of Infocom's Zork):


ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Infocom interactive fiction - a fantasy story
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 Infocom, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 52 / Serial number 871125 / Interpreter 4 Version F

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>

Commercial text adventures are long gone, but there is an active community writing freely available games, based around the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. The Interactive Fiction Archive and its mirrors contains the vast majority of the community's work. If you're looking for somewhere to start making sense of all the games and systems in the Archive, try Baf's Guide to the IF-Archive.

Most of these games are written in various well defined formats, for which interpreters are built for various operating systems. To play, all you need to do is start the relevant interpreter for your computer, then load in the game you want to play. The following are the interpreters I've been involved with:

Windows Frotz, for Z-code (Infocom) games.
Windows Glulxe, for Glulx games.
Windows AGiliTy, for AGT games.
Magnetic, for games written by Magnetic Scrolls.
Level9, for games written by Level 9.

Ancient Software

In the computer world "old" is anything not made this year, so "ancient" in this context means from the 1980s. Below are several old software packages I've worked on resurrecting for modern systems:

AberMUD II, one of the first MUDs (a multi-user text adventure, effectively).
DBW-Render, an early ray tracing graphics package.
Omega, a game inspired by Rogue and the Ultima series.
Xlife, an implementation of John Conway's "Life" cellular automata, optimized for very large patterns.
Commodore 64 bits and pieces.

Tools

Assorted tools I've written for various tasks:

Flash Edit, a tool for getting at and changing the images in a Flash animation file.
Report Config, a tool to output details of a PC's configuration.