With this week's update, InvisiClues.org now archives more than 300 historical magazine and newspaper articles about Infocom's games, designers, and history, with more historical articles added frequently.
#Infocom #RetroGaming

https://www.invisiclues.org/library

it is safe to say that 90% of my taste in computer games is thanks to the original abandonware site Home of the Underdogs. every few months i’d make it a point to download one of their Top Dog awarded games, and all of them lived up to it.

in particular, westwood/infocom’s Mines of Titan always interested me. it never quite fit into infocom’s IF catalog, and it predated the much more popular Eye of the Beholder. i always avoided it because it looked like just another dungeon crawler.

as it turns out, Mines of Titan is far closer to Wasteland or Neuromancer than any other game. part text adventure, part rpg, it evokes a surprisingly unique world that easily fits in a philip k dick styled universe.

today, the box arrived after two decades of looking for one. per infocom’s exceptional marketing company, the browsies included in the box are wonderful - official letterheads and employee bulletins from mars corporations.

betsyandsamantha now has a home on #youtube. All completed longplay content on #twitch has been moved to there, and as we complete games, they'll be downloaded and added.

Games are organised by playlist for ease.

https://www.youtube.com/@betsyandsamantha/playlists

I may consider adding to Peertube in the future.

There's content here from #infocom #atarist, #zxspectrum, #macintosh classic and modern #adventuregames.

I'm also working on a write-up detailing my video and audio capture setup.

before Westwood became a household name, it was a development house contracted out by major publishers

one of its many forgotten early titles is the *excellent* Mines of Titan published by Infocom in 1989.

along with Circuit's Edge - built on the same engine - this is a futuristic RPG with a *very* similar interface to interplay's Wasteland and Neuromancer.

the combat is pretty unforgiving in the first few minutes, so i can imagine this irritated a lot of adventure gamers at first.

Someone should create a book version of the Zork trilogy. After all, it’s just text and would be fun as a Choose Your Own Adventure.

]#gamedev ]#writing #infocom

After much testing and code comparison, the new Feb 2025 Release of #Vezza - my #z80 high speed #zmachine is ready! Took way longer than expected to synchronize across all of the code bases, particularly making sure that all optimizations made it across all platforms - TRS-80 model 1, TRS-80 model 3, TRS-80 model 4, the CP/M versions (~18 platforms), the embedded versions (Spectrum tape, TEC-1G), and slowly pushing into the Agon Light version (which has even more updates still in progress). Lots of individual tweaks, and some major rethinks and rewrites have come together to accelerate game play.

The hardest part of rewriting in this update involved rewriting the dictionary search code. I ended up going back to the original jzip interpreter, written in C for Unix waaay back when. Jzip provided much of the logic that went into ZXZVM, which provided the base for #M4ZVM #M3ZVM and #Vezza. Going back to Jzip made sense as Jzip has an even longer history; and is highly tested and stable and still maintained. This research gave me the confidence that the streamlining and changes I was making to such a fundamental part of the game would work, making all inputted dictionary searching more efficient.

To work around how CP/M stores executable files I spent a lot of time re-organising the memory map to make the executable smaller. This involved rearranging where the initialization code was stored inside the increasingly complex layout. Support across multiple versions means I needed to break up variable sized code and strings to sit inside variable sized gaps, while still compiling all the CP/M versions from the same interconnected set of source files. It needed quite a few manual checks to ensure that it all worked.

What this all means is that your favourite #infocom #punyinform and other text adventures will all play on your favourite z80 #retrocomputing platforms even faster than before!

More details in the devlog and downloads can be found at:
#TRS80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/m4zvm
#CPM #CPM80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/vezza

We're streaming tonight at 2000 GMT.

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha

Going to go and get the good ending for Planetfall on the Atari ST, and then switch to The Longest Journey on PC.

Yep, I know. A practically modern game. I like this one though. And it works on ScummVM.

#Playing ZORK on End of The Line BBS:
https://endofthelinebbs.com/

You can play a lot of Infocom games there, & save your progression.

I'm taking a lot of notes. Playing in a dark place only lightened by some diode lights. The cat sleeps in a cardboard box nearby with all 4 irons in the air. What a scene! :0)

#zork #infocom #adventure #text #games #gaming #retrogaming #retrocomputing
#BBS #BBSing #ssh #EndOfTheLineBBS #bulletinboards #textmode #ANSI #ASCII #terminal #retrocomputing #oldschool

We're back playing more PlanetFall on the Atari ST at 2000 GMT over on Twitch. More robots, more confusion, more Spuulz.

More moments like this (this moment not from Planetfall):
https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha/clip/SnappyTenuousAnacondaNononoCat-Ljlh-j63_X__Fg35

or this

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha/clip/CovertCaringHippoCharlieBitMe-HtjXxkxK5OzbhAfQ

or this

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha/clip/VictoriousInventiveAntelopeTBTacoRight-rpKNs4UkCM6peCPX

Watch me make an utter prat of myself on camera, usually doing silly voices.

I FOUND IT.
IT HAS THE PENCIL.
IT DIDN'T COST A FORTUNE.
IT'S IN GREAT CONDITION.

OH GODS.

We're going to be streaming Part 3 of Infocom's Planetfall at 20:00 GMT on the Atari ST. Real hardware, real adventure, real robots, real FRUSTRATION!

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha

Neat breakdown of Zork internals (and text adventure games in general).

https://medium.com/swlh/zork-the-great-inner-workings-b68012952bdc

https://archive.ph/QeJjt

Somehow
Fabularium received an update to v1.51! Fabularium helps you to write and play interactive fiction. My to go app for the classy Infocom Text adcentures on Android. #game #games #retro #retrogames #retrogaming #gaming #infocom #textadventures #interactivefiction
https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium

New project!

The Visible Zorker: a toy which lets you explore Zork 1 *and* the source code that makes it go. An exercise in making software transparent.

https://eblong.com/infocom/visi-zork1/

A post about how and why I did this:

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/01/the-visible-zorker

Enjoy!

We'll be getting back to playing more of Infocom's Plantfall.

We managed to get off the ship last week. Can we actually manage more than 5 minutes of gameplay this week?

Playing on the Atari ST, and we've got some MIDI tunes playing on the stack of DOOM.

Kicking off at 2000 GMT.

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha

[Nouveau billet] In RSS we trust* - Patrimoine et numérique

https://patrimoine-et-numerique.fr/tutoriels/88-44-in-rss-we-trust

De l'utilité des flux RSS pour s'informer comme internaute / professionnel, et de la nécessité d'en fournir pour les sites Internet

*established since 2002

#RSS #RSSfeed #fluxRSS #information #numérique #infocom #web #RSN #veille

poke @agnes_vbb @BruantC

avec dedans un poil de #FreshRSS chez @zaclys et un pouet qui tombe à pic de @thibault_lh