Technological Apocalypse

I just thought I would take a moment to mention why things have been a bit quiet around here lately and also why all the estimated release dates mentioned in the last few blogs had to be pushed up a bit longer.

I was making very good progress on Eamon Deluxe 5.0 as well as the various side projects that have mutated out of it when my household became enveloped in what I can only describe as a technological apocalypse of sorts. It seems that over the period of a week or so nearly everything electronic or mechanical that I was using decided to crash or fail in some way, including two vehicles and nearly every computer in the house. I have never experienced anything quite like that and am really more amazed than annoyed. However it has kept me extremely busy since I do my own repairs on just about everything.

I had to reformat a few computers, including the one that I do all of my work on. Fortunately there was very little data loss, but I still don't have everything back in the order it was before. It also doesn't help that I had five open projects going on at the time of the crash so I have to retrace my steps and figure out where I was at with all of them before continuing work. As of right now, order has mostly been restored and if nothing comes up this weekend, I should be able to finish up a few projects and actually release some software instead of just blogging about it.

Projects that have top priority right now are:

Release the final Eamon Deluxe 5.0 beta to play testers. This is about 70% finished.

Release a stand alone version of Thomas Ferguson's fantastic Eamon Deluxe adventure, "A Runcible Cargo". At the last moment I decided that, since this was such a good adventure, it deserved a complete transplant and upgrade into the new Eamon Deluxe 5.0 adventure programs. This is about 80% finished.

Post reviews and more detailed info about Jared Davis' revised Eamon Deluxe original adventure, "Realm of Fantasy", which I recently released as a stand alone download. I also ordered a copy of Jared's recently published first novel and was planning to review that at the same time to give him a little publicity. I only manged to read a few chapters before everything crashed on me, however, so I'll probably just edit and post the adventure reviews this weekend and review his book at a later time.

Release the beta copy of The PC Eamon Museum project I mentioned in my last blog. The museum contains bundle of three different attempted ports of Eamon to MS-DOS, along with two old versions of Eamon Deluxe from my archives. Currently all of these systems are a lot of work to get up and running on any modern computer. The museum is a cross platform package, based on the Eamon Deluxe 5.0 framework, which makes them now easily installed and playable with just a few clicks to anyone who wants to explore these relics of Eamon weirdness but doesn't have the time or technical knowledge to run the obsolete source files. The PC Eamon Museum appeared to be around 99% done before my system crash so that may hopefully be ready this weekend as well. I'm going to send copies to my play testers first, then create a page for it on the Guild website with public download links.

I still have a few openings for play testers and am gladly accepting offers for help in any other areas (note: experienced Mac and Linux users would be especially helpful right now). Email eamondeluxe (at) gmail.com if interested in testing or contributing to these projects.