Commodore Vic 20; A Visual History - free pdf eBook

[CrashedAlex]

During the lockdown I've been hankering after revisiting some of the games I enjoyed years ago.

I found a piece of software called Frotz which plays all of the wonderful Infocom games.

I found an archive which had all of the Scott Adams text adventures converted to Frotz - but none of them (bar his first) work properly.

Can anyone steer me the in the right direction?

[tufty]

Frotz is more aimed at the Infocom games, for Scott Adams' stuff you probably want advint. Alternatively, you can play them on the web,

https://www.ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=44

Once you've done with them, and the infocoms, there's a whole load of really good modern stuff, mostly written for the infocom virtual machine. Check the winners from the annual interactive fiction competition, https://ifcomp.org/, there's only 24 years' worth of games to plugh through.

[RedOktober]

That's quite a litany of insults you're cultivating in your sig there.

[tufty]

It is, although I've been quite lax on getting new ones recently.

[edit] Oh, actually, I'd missed adding one, but I'm out of space.

[CrashedAlex]

Thanks for the link. I just spent a few minutes returning to Pirate Cove.

I think I do miss the world of text adventures. I remember the one that drew some visuals in. Seeing "The Hobbit" run from disk was like watching a Pixar movie at the time. It was quite incredible.
I do get a tad bored with the cinematic AAA 'shootin' and a killin''' epics this days. So I have been returning to some older pieces of software.

I found a site showing all the of US Infocom packaging. Some of it is quite wonderful.

[Misfit]

Thanks for the link. I just spent a few minutes returning to Pirate Cove.

I think I do miss the world of text adventures. I remember the one that drew some visuals in. Seeing "The Hobbit" run from disk was like watching a Pixar movie at the time. It was quite incredible.
I do get a tad bored with the cinematic AAA 'shootin' and a killin''' epics this days. So I have been returning to some older pieces of software.

I found a site showing all the of US Infocom packaging. Some of it is quite wonderful.

I remember the Hobbit taking 18 minutes to load off tape on a friend's Spectrum. Kinda killed the magic for me!

I think the Level 9 Computing text games (I played them on the ST) were also great.

Agreed on the AAA thing, but if I do revisit text games I want those without a maze I have to map...

[venusian]

In the time of AI chatbots, dialogue based games are surely an untapped market - ones where the whole experience is just talking with the computer.

[Dio]

I remember the Hobbit taking 18 minutes to load off tape on a friend's Spectrum. Kinda killed the magic for me!

Unless he had a very dodgy tape recorder and kept having to restart, you remember wrong, I'm afraid.

You may be thinking of the C64 version, which took nearly half an hour to load; the later Sherlock broke the record and spelled the end of standard-speed C64 loaders with its insane 45 minute load time.

Because the Spectrum had a decent tape interface it was pretty much impossible for any game to take more than about 4 minutes to load (1KB per 5 seconds was the typical rate for the OS loader).

[F-ZeroOne]

Admitedly my memories are a bit vague now but I seem to recall that at least some Spectrum games took slighter longer to load, up to eight minutes; 48K "StarGlider" is the one I have in my head though I may be getting it mixed up with something else. Whatever tape recorder I would have been using at the time wouldn't have been the highest quality though.

[Dio]

Looks like about 5 minutes from the TZX.