.KEYWORD brother
.FLYINGHEAD FUN AND GAMES
.TITLE Running classic interactive text adventures on your Palm device
.OTHER
.SUMMARY When Managing Editor Denise Amrich told us her little brother wanted to write an article, our first thought was of how to let the tyke down gently. But Dan Amrich’s no ordinary little brother. He’s the Associate Editor of GamePro, one of the coolest game magazines on the planet. We’re thrilled to be able to offer you Dan’s gaming experience in this introduction to text adventure games for your Palm device. Let the productivity-drain begin!
.AUTHOR Dan Amrich
Ask any fan of video and computer games, and he or she will tell you: it’s all about the game play. Graphics and sound take a back seat to how much fun it is to interact with the game’s fake universe. How easy is it for you to forget about the real world once you’re there? Good game play makes good games, and a well-designed and executed computer game will be captivating–no matter what hardware it runs on.
No games better illustrated this principle than the interactive fiction games (sometimes shortened as "IF," but even better known as merely "text adventures") created by Infocom in the early 1980s. Infocom releases like Zork (shown in Figure A), The Witness, and Enchanter featured no graphics at all–just detailed prose, spitting out descriptions of magical realms, hardened gumshoes, and futuristic worlds, spanning all genres of storytelling.
.FIGPAIR A This rare box art from the original Zork was all the game ever offered in terms of graphics! Take a gander at that ancient TRS-80 logo!
A simple, two-word parser gave you all the freedom you’d need. Typing in basic phrases like "go east," "take sword," "light match," and "get away" let you, the player, star in your own book, using only text and imagination to tell the story. Fancy graphics need not apply.
Of course, graphics not only held their ground, they ultimately conquered the text adventure. Despite successes like the fantasy-based Zork trilogy, the murder mystery Deadline, the risque B-movie send-up Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and an interactive version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (shown in Figure B) written by Douglas Adams himself, interactive fiction eventually fell out of vogue. Infocom was acquired by Activision and attempted to update their games with graphics, but it spoiled the product and flopped at retail.
.FIGPAIR B Wacky sci-fi demigod Douglas Adams wrote the interactive version of Hitchhiker’s Guide himself.
.H1 Old software never dies
By the late 80’s, the golden age was over and these great old games were presumed lost for good. Yet, old software never dies, folks. It just gets emulated. What better fit for Palm entertainment than interactive fiction? Its requirements are basic. Rudimentary interface? Check. Text input and output? No problem. Small program size? Yes, please. In hindsight, it almost seems like destiny; after all, two of Infocom’s founders wrote "How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine" for Creative Computing in July 1980. They never knew just how small the machines would get. [And making history weirder yet, your esteemed editor-in-chief was an editor for Creative Computing during that very summer way back when.–DG].
To run text adventures on your Palm device, you’ll need three things, the first being the games themselves. Over the last decade, Activision has reissued literally everything Infocom ever created on various software collections for PC and Mac. The most recent repackaging, Infocom Masterpieces (shown in Figure C), crams 33 text adventures (plus six previously unpublished winners of an interactive fiction writing contest) onto one disc.
.FIGPAIR C Infocom Masterpieces: The grand poobah of text adventure repackages.
The only major game not archived in the collection is Hitchhiker. To find that, you’ll need to seek out Activision’s earlier, multi-volume CD set, The Infocom Collection. It’s on The Comedy Collection disc. Naturally, because you now want these discs, they’re all out of print — but you can probably still find them on some store shelves for less than $30. If you still have Infocom games from the old days, they’re still good–if you can get them off the old disks, the raw game data is all you’ll need. [We also searched eBay for "infocom" and on the day of the search, found 26 listings of Infocom products being auctioned off. — DG]
Of course, you could just leech files like the rest of the world. To promote a multimedia sequel to Zork last year, Activision gave away the original three Zork games as freebies; you can still download them, guilt-free, from various fan sites. See the Product Availability and Resources section at the end of this article for more information. Additionally, there is a teeming community of independent fans and writers who create their own games every year for fun and profit (but mostly fun). There’s plenty of quality, free stuff out there if you look.
.H1 How do I get these games into my Palm device?
I know, I know–get to the Palm stuff. Once you’ve got some games to play, you’ll need to convert them from their native, open-platform "Z-machine" language (named in honor of Zork, of course) to a Palm database file. For this, you must use Zip Wrapper for Macintosh or MakePRC for PCs. You can download either of these from the many Palm download sites across the Web.
Of the two, Zip Wrapper is much easier to use, thanks to drag-and-drop simplicity (the PC version is a port of the Mac app). I dumped five of my favorite games, including the Lovecraftian adventure The Lurking Horror and the wordplay romp Nord & Bert, directly from application file to Palm format on my Mac at work in about five minutes. If you’re copying the game files from a PC disk or an obsolete format like TRS-80 or Apple II, all you should need to convert is the raw .DAT file; most of the other things on the disk are platform-specific. Of course, there are separate challenges involved in moving (or even finding) the old TRS-80 or Apple II format files, which is why the PC collections are a better source for the old games.
Not all games will survive the conversion-later releases like Arthur, Journey, and Bureaucracy all used graphic elements of one kind or another and therefore won’t play through a Palm interpreter–but most of The Classics will work fine.
Finally, once you’ve got the game all gussied up as a Palm .PDB file, it’s time to play. The best Z-code interpreter out right now is Pilot-Frotz (at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367), created by Alien Hunter and distributed as freeware. Pilot-Frotz requires you to enter your instructions in Graffiti; there’s no pop-up keyboard option, which is a minor drag. However, the program offers something even better: you can tap words on the screen to copy them into your command line. If the game tells you "There is a drooling monster here," scribble "kill" then tap "monster" from the description, and save yourself some handwriting. Figure D shows an example of a Pilot-Frotz pop-up menu.
.FIG D Pilot-Frotz’s pop-up menus offer shortcuts and tappable commands while keeping the screen uncluttered.
There’s also a pop-up compass and a list of common commands. Pilot-Frotz even lets you choose the font size and adjust the number of pages you can scroll back in the narrative. It’s impressively flexible.
While Infocom games are teeny by modern standards–most run between 50K and 300K–keeping a handful of text adventures in your Palm memory will eat up a lot of space on a basic 1MB Palm like my Professional, as shown in Figure E.
.FIG E Text adventures take anywhere from 50K to 300K of Palm memory, depending on the length and detail of the game.
You’ll need space for multiple save games, too; even though those saves increase in size as you progress through the games, they’ll only take up 3K each at the maximum. Those of you with memory upgrades or more modern Palm devices probably don’t need to worry, but low-end users will most likely only want to load and play one game at a time.
.CALLOUT The program runs totally silent, and requires a lot of Graffiti input and serious-looking tapping–the hallmarks of real work. Think of it as Stealth Fun.
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Also, Pilot-Frotz offers something many Palm toys don’t: Stealth Fun. The program runs totally silent, and requires a lot of Graffiti input and serious-looking tapping–the hallmarks of "real work". If a colleague sneaks a peek at your screen, they’ll see lots of text and assume you’re merely documenting a detailed idea. As far as anyone around you knows, you’re doing important things like scheduling meetings and reviewing notes, not goofing off and saving the world.
Pilot-Frotz has not only offered me cerebral, silent entertainment on my daily commute, but it’s improved my Graffiti skills as well– making me the envy of my nerdy Palm friends. Plus, you can’t beat freeware for sheer gaming value. If you haven’t visited Zork’s fantasy world of Frobozz lately, perhaps it’s time for a virtual vacation.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
If you want to have your own Stealth Fun, you should check out these resources. Don’t come crying to us if you get caught.
.H2 Interactive fiction for the Palm computer
Visit http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/9590/interactive.htm. This is the best place for Palm-specific interactive fiction information. There’s also a ton of original IF games, free for the taking.
.H2 Infocom to Palm conversion utilities
Visit http://www.palmglyph.com/gamma.html for the crucial Z-code converters for PC, Mac, and Unix.
.H2 Pilot-Frotz
Pilot-Frotz is available at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367. It’s the best and most current Z-machine interpreter/emulator for the Palm Pilot. The author has written a few original non-IF Palm games, too.
.H2 The Unofficial Infocom Homepage
Visit http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/ for everything you ever wanted to know about Infocom, its creations, and its creators. This site also offers the free versions of Zork.
.H2 Interactive Fiction and The Mining Company
Visit http://interactfiction.miningco.com/ for a great overview of the whole IF community, as well as tons of links.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Dan Amrich is associate editor of GamePro, the world’s largest multiplatform gaming magazine. Visit http://www.gameproworld.com for more information. Writing under the name Dan Elektro, he plays video games all day long, living the dream of 13-year-olds everywhere. With this article, he explores the wondrous world of nepotism thanks to his big sister Denise.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6d180
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