Apr03
The Boston IF meetup for April will be Tuesday, April 13, 6:30 pm Eastern time.
We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
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The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
Boston's IF interest group
Play games from a list of Interactive Fiction titles selected by the People's Republic.
How Do I Play?
Not certain what to type first? Download our handy IF-for-beginners card:
Still not sure what to type first? Read A Beginner's Guide to Interactive Fiction.
Feb19
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, January 19, 2021. Zarf, kaysavetz and Carrington (Eaten by a Grue), Stephen Jablonski, Mark Pilgrim, nickm, Hugh Steers, Dave Thompsen, and anjchang welcomed Michael Verdi, Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Kay shared faxprices.com
Carrington to Everyone (6:34 PM)
https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/
Carrington – Twitch & Sniff Along- https://tasa.jasbrooks.net
series on twitch where people do a play-through of games with scratch and sniff\
Zarf- MIT Mystery hunt happened -There was one Inform 7 puzzle, carefully engineered to fetch the spoilery responses from server so you couldn’t decompile the game file.
Mentions of Ryan Veeder’s Lurking Horror text puzzle
VCV Rack, Synth pack simulator
Instrument pack from Popcorn song
Lurking Horror II:
Kay and Carrington are still playing Arthur.
Carrington is an Earl. Kay is still a serf. Really enjoying it.
Much better than Shogun. Feels like a Zork game. Mark mentions the DIgital Antiquarian review of Arthur.
Mark P mentions Easter Egg in Thaumistry
Pitch Dark update– Pitch Darker. Non infocom text adventure, like Pitch Dark but volume 2.
New Z3 games — John Wilson made 3 new games compiled in Z3. Works well on 8-bit machines.
http://www.zenobi.co.uk/
Star Wars Episode IV IPv6
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Zork – check out the Binary from original ITS Mainframe without sword. You can try the ITS environment online! Telnet to its.pdp10.se, port 10003 (telnet its.pdp10.se 10003). When it says “Connected…”, hit ctrl-Z. Then type :login yourname. (Any name will work.) Then type :zork to play.
https://eblong.com/infocom/#zork1
diff r88 to r119: https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/commit/87a3b787d166a441cab8d89d87f9a3753d40daa8
Mark does work with classic infocom grades ported to harddrive, lots of apple2 “Pitch Dark” Collection
Narrascope 2021 is taking a break. IFTF is in the process of trying to expand. Michael Verdi reported that he attended virtually and had good feedback.
This past week was Boston Independent Gamed Festival
ARESIA , Readercon SCIFI convention
Maybe a Boston Game Jame
Aresa
XYZZY Awards planning under way.
Spring Thing is coming along.
Parsercomp Competiton for Parser Games
https://intfiction.org/t/parsercomp-2-0-gauging-interest-level/48995
Stephen mentions his archive of Mac Plus games
archive.org
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac
Jan16
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, December 22, 2020. Zarf, kaysavetz and Carrington (Eaten by a Grue), Josh Grams, Stephen Jablonski, nickm, Hugh Steers, anjchang and Dave Thompsen attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Talked about keyboards https://fusion.durgod.com
IF comp wrapped up, Tie for first place this year , check it out https://ifcomp.org/comp/2020
In 1995, there were multiple first places
Nanogenmo happened- https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues
A lot of GPT2 based projects last year
This year, not as many entries
Nick made use of Kay’s apple 2 bot for his one line basic program
1001 Basic
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/73
Kay threw in something for NanoGenMo
51300 baby names
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/69
165 days of christmas
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/70
Other Nanogenmo:
Alices Adventures in Run-On land
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/81
replaces . with ‘, and then’ and also replaces gendered pronouns with non binary words.
Leonard Richardson’s Alices Adventures in the Whale… InDialogue
Many entries are just length, not actual stories:
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues/71
Self modifying basic program possible on AppleSoft but not C64
Carrington and Kay started playing Shogun on their podcast (Eaten by a Grue), http://gallery.guetech.org/shogun/shogun.html
Using the manual https://www.mocagh.org/infocom/shogun-manual.pdf
Like infoCom’s “The Hobbit,” it’s better if you have read the book.
Do people enjoy recreating the book?
Talk about rocky horror picture show and re-enactment.
Book adaptation discussion:
Journey Infocom
Arthur Infocom
Tom Snyder Infocom games
Mines of Titan
Lost Treasures of Infocom
Adaptation of “Animal Farm” by Emily Short
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/game/orwells-animal-farm/
Question from Steve – Anyone know how to make MFS disk images read/writable? Carrington uses AppleCommander for Apple 2 stuff.
Question from Nick – Do people have positive experience taking video from CRTs without using GenLock? Kay suggests iPhone live mode, clears up stripe.
Question from Kay – Someone took Apple 2 Eamon wiki and ported to Atari ST and uploaded to Genie online service. A person wrote four orginal adventures to Aventure’s Genie file library. Have you heard of Oasis in the Desert or The Proving Ground?
Nick got to talk about Amazing Quest at Seattle.
https://nickm.com/if/amazing_quest
https://2234.play.ifcomp.org/content/index.html
Posted the Q&A about Amazing Quest, a 12-line program for C64.Trick: no need for closing quote at end of BASIC line, representing decimals with .
Currently 2 ports of the game to Python.
10 Line Basic Contest ideas to prepare for
Last year Nick Entered with Jesper Juul
https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/2020
Nick’s amazing quest is actually 12 lines https://nickm.com/if/amazing_quest
256 byte IF by Nick
https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=f0dpgg80motlhs42
Nick has a blog post about it
https://nickm.com/post/2020/12/amazing-quest-qa/
Demoscene discussion
Some band used a twitterbot to tweet out that they were awesome
https://twitter.com/ninjasexparty/status/1218335379989942272
Taper #6: A Throw of the Dice Open Call for Submissions of Interactive HTML5 Works under 2Kb due Feb. 7th. http://taper.badquar.to/5/about.html#submit
From a random hacker “: I found a gem!”
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