Guide on playing Infocom and Inform games on the QL
Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2010 10:39 pm
Just thought I'd post a bit of a guide on how to play Infocom and Inform games on the QL.
A quick cobbled up introduction for you all first. Infocom was a large US company back in the 80's who made some of the finest text based adventure games ever made covering a wide range of genres. Everything from wizards, murder mysteries, film noirs, to Sherlock Holmes and even a version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which was done with Douglas Adams.
The games had their own virtual program language format which meant they were easily portable across different platforms. All you need is the interpreter for your system to play the data file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
The Infocom format was later drawn up as a standard called Inform so people could create and play their own adventures. Which basically leaves us with a massive archive of top quality games to enjoy.
First up you need the following Infocom Routines for Qdos file from Dilwyn's excellent resource site:
http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/index.html
This needs to be unzipped on a QL to preserve the file headers, unzipped you will have some program files and some adventures with a _dat extension. First up I enable toolkit 2 commands with tk2_ext, then I set the prog_use flp1_ and data_use flp1_ system values to use flp1_ floppy drive.
Next to run the program type ex zip, con_512x256a0x0;"busted_dat" this will load the game busted in full monitor mode. With the zip program being multi tasking use ctrl + c to change the input to the adventure.
ex zip;"busted_dat" will start the game in normal tv mode. If you are lucky enough to own one of the infocom collections (either via ebay or elsewhere ) you can copy out the _dat file of the game folder to run instead. The QL version of the zip interpreter by Luke Roberts supports versions 1 to 5 of the infocom/inform adventures, usually stated as z1 to z5.
Loads of free adventures can be found here:
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc ... zcode.html
A quick cobbled up introduction for you all first. Infocom was a large US company back in the 80's who made some of the finest text based adventure games ever made covering a wide range of genres. Everything from wizards, murder mysteries, film noirs, to Sherlock Holmes and even a version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which was done with Douglas Adams.
The games had their own virtual program language format which meant they were easily portable across different platforms. All you need is the interpreter for your system to play the data file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom
The Infocom format was later drawn up as a standard called Inform so people could create and play their own adventures. Which basically leaves us with a massive archive of top quality games to enjoy.
First up you need the following Infocom Routines for Qdos file from Dilwyn's excellent resource site:
http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/index.html
This needs to be unzipped on a QL to preserve the file headers, unzipped you will have some program files and some adventures with a _dat extension. First up I enable toolkit 2 commands with tk2_ext, then I set the prog_use flp1_ and data_use flp1_ system values to use flp1_ floppy drive.
Next to run the program type ex zip, con_512x256a0x0;"busted_dat" this will load the game busted in full monitor mode. With the zip program being multi tasking use ctrl + c to change the input to the adventure.
ex zip;"busted_dat" will start the game in normal tv mode. If you are lucky enough to own one of the infocom collections (either via ebay or elsewhere ) you can copy out the _dat file of the game folder to run instead. The QL version of the zip interpreter by Luke Roberts supports versions 1 to 5 of the infocom/inform adventures, usually stated as z1 to z5.
Loads of free adventures can be found here:
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc ... zcode.html