The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, May 17, 2021. Zarf, Nickm, Hugh Steers,,KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), Dave Thompsen , Mark Pilgrim, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, and anjchang attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Board Game Cafes are awesome. In Toronto there are a bunch called “Snakes & Lattes.”
Plans for the fall discussion
Spring Thing Results are in. Play here https://www.springthing.net/2021/play.html
IFComp is on the radar
ParserComp accepting submissions until the end of June.’ https://intfiction.org/t/parsercomp-2021-the-main-post/49424
Flights of Foundry happened. Zarf and Aaron spoke.
Aaron spoke at BangBangComp synopsis of his 50 year history of text games. His newsletter has started to incorporate other types of games e.g. play by mail (PBM) games. There are also play by email games.
.https://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island
Zarf inform6 compiler fixes. New release of inform6 is coming out soon. Fixing lots of bugs
Kay mentions coming to MIT and attending a talk. Monster Island
Kay is playing Journey, (the Quest Begins) the final infocom game. Carrington has “been finished” by Journey.
Zarf mentions Lucinda’s Door’s of Moria puzzle.
Resource allocation mechanism is the least favorite feature of infocom.
mention of all the different flavors of Zork. Zork Zero is next. Then post post infocom Return to Zork.Zork Nemesis. Zork the Grand Inquisitor. Zork Underground.
Discussion about CDR of games for infocom
Zarf recounts going into Borders’ encounter where CD of Shareware and Masterpieces that had Zarfs came on it. IceBreaker 1975 Arcade Game by Andy Rlooney? 3CDroms with his software in it.
Opinions on Zork flavors discussion– good times!
Grand Inquisitor Enchanter series
Infocomics and Mines of Titan
Carrington and Kay tried to get a copy of some infocom abandonware, no even numbered lessons, couldn’t figure out how to run the program for APril fools and Dave mentions that getting it to run is the metapuzzle.
Snide mention of CYOA adventure books
Beyond Meanwhile
Trial of the Clone by Zach Winersmith
Pier Moran’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. HB/FB/UB/BB notations havent/forgotten/bought book. Student Read Book (SRB) another way to read a book!
Meanwhile from Jason Shiga
HopScotch by Julio Cortazar
Wikipedia
Horror short stories with chooser
Maze by Chris Manson (text , multisequential) 1984
Daedalian Depths Homage to Maze
Return to Zork.
Neither Either nor Or by Joey Duboc
Ryan North;s series of Chooseable Path Adventures
Jonathan Bowls Ex Machina. Each line has a goto statement
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
House of Leaves
Kay received Apple2 disks from someone in Marshfield MA. “Natural Language Processing” on Apple2 written in Forth Language. He put them on Github. Would anyone know or find this useful? Also MachineLearning
Apple Forth reminiscence
Kay tells a story about how he got sent this by Prentice. Great condition. Wants issues of microcomputing newsletter.
Mitchell Marcus’s Thesis on Natural Language
Nick’s looking for working hardware donations from the Boston/NY Area
Commodore block monitors, additional apple2C’s 1702 monitors and stuff in Boston and NY
connector. Apple2C, that makes it think the SD is a floppy drive
Cheesing games. Wizardry RPG apple2 game ; write to disk immediately after you died– but if you were able to catch it before it flickered hack. Or you learn sector layout on disk and use your sector editor. Bards Tale. They used to have a game that charge for recovering your character. This is the current model for iPhone games.
Hugh software that works on emulators work but it doesn’t work on real machine. Screen update is different on emulators:. Actual hardware refresh is different from emulator. You can try things out on multiple emulators. Sometimes Registers are different. Sound Code was shared across emulators. C64 Rom revisions are different (background colors are set in earlier version)…
