Posts under ‘interactive fiction’

I ran across a Riven 5-CD disk set while I was cleaning out a desk today. Myst was such a cool and revolutionary game when it first came out, but I think Riven was even better. It’s hard to describe the genre Myst and Riven reside in, kind of a cross between adventure, fantasy, and [...]

Someone found a complete backup of Infocom’s (of Zork legend) shared network drive from 1989. Apparently, it includes a complete copy of the sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, called Milliways. It even includes links to the prototype Z-code files. Check it out, if you’re nostalgic or an IF fan. Wowser!

This nice article brought back memories of old-school copy protection, such as “enter last word of second to last sentence on page 72 of game manual” or intentional bad sectors on commercial 5.25 inch floppies in an attempt to thwart copying on the 1541.

I’m about 50% complete with the Java implementation of Leafpile but have decided to put development on the back-burner while I focus on learning to write Mac applications. In fact, why not simply port what I have now over to a Cocoa application. Mac is back in service again, and I’ve really been itching to [...]

Progress has been glacial, but as of today, about 25% of the opcodes are coded and tested. I completed a “simple” console UI using Swing and the Java 2D API because I was at a point where I needed some kind of user interface to do any kind of useful testing. I don’t work much [...]

I setup a new project at SourceForge called Leafpile. The plan is to do a Java implementation of the Z-machine virtual machine used for running interactive fiction story files, (think: Infocom). There’s a very concise standard out there for how to do this, called the Z-Machine Standards Document.

Lots of Post-It notes and scribbles already.
There are [...]

I was cleaning up an old hard drive yesterday and ran across a pile of Infocom data files from their popular text adventures. They probably came from an old compilation I picked up years ago called The Lost Treasures of Infocom. I absolutely loved playing these games on my Commodore 64.
Infocom’s games ran on a [...]