Eamon Pour Les Francophones

For any readers of the Eamon Blog of French extraction, tired of having to deal with Eamon for the Apple II in English and hoping to transact with Hokas Tokas et al. in their native tongue, there may yet be hope.

It appears that Eamon had enough of a following in France to warrant a translation, Le Monde Merveilleux d'Eamon, distributed by two companies- Vif Logiciels Domaine Public and Reseau Planétaire. (The Eamon Dragon seems to have made an appearance in the former's game Connall as well.)

According to the collective wisdom of the internets, the Main Hall, Designer Disk, and a handful of adventures appeared in French. 

The mind runs wild with thoughts of the sorts of adventures must have been written for the system. A one-room dungeon adapting Sartre's No Exit? 

GO NORTH

YOU CAN'T LEAVE THE ROOM! 

Or, perhaps, a dungeon inspired by Of Grammatology?

EXAMINE SIGN

THE THESIS OF THE ARBITRARINESS OF THE SIGN MUST FORBID A RADICAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE LINGUISTIC AND THE GRAPHIC SIGN!

In seriousness, though, it would be interesting to see what became of this system. Disk images appear to exist, judging from the existence of screenshots (witnessed above) and mention on some message boards. Readers can learn about as much as I know by visiting http://boutillon.free.fr/Underground/Jeux/Connall/Connall.html, from which I took the above screens (there's an interesting examination of the provenance of the dragon there as well). 

Have you played this? Have copies of the disk images? Can you explain Derrida? Leave a comment!

History of 'Imagery', the Commodore 64 Eamon cousin. Part 1

The following was excerpted out of a recent email from Thomas Ferguson to me. For those of you who just Googled "Eamon" for the first time in decades due to a sudden case of 8 bit nostalgia (or are confused and disappointed because you came here looking for the one-hit rapper):

Thomas is an active historian/archaeologist/preservationist for Donald Brown's "Vanilla" Eamon and all other things which mutated from that text adventure/RPG combo masterpiece of yore. He also happens to be one of the best author's ever to pen an Eamon adventure (A Runcible Cargo) and is also the current editor/publisher of the revived Eamon (Deluxe) Newsletter.

Frank,

I don't have the magical powers that you and Matt Clark have, but I'd recommend this as a blog post if its convenient:

https://www.commodoreserver.com/BlogEntryView.asp?EID=D09875B9F0664F729686FB611C01C2D3

Kent Sullivan is posting a retrospective on the company that released Imagery! He's a super nice guy, it seems, and many readers of the Eamon blog would benefit from hearing about our distant cousins, I think.

I also anticipate finishing "Crypt Crashers" [Eamon Deluxe 5.0 conversion of a formerly "lost" Atari ST Eamon original] in the next few days. I've got most of the problems ironed out.

I hope that you're well.

Best,

TMF

I reckon that Thomas is correct about the Dr. Evil Laboratories articles being both interesting and relevant to readers of the Guild blog and plan to post links to the rest of the series as it develops.

So, unless you are still reading this in hope of it being a heavily disguised blog for the rapper, follow the link within the message to check out Kent Sullivan's fun blog and very cool "corporate logo".


Other Imagery! Related links (sort of):

• Minor Reference with Little Info
• Minor Reference with Just as Little Info (Deutsche Sprache)
• Not Helpful At All (Apparently Google felt otherwise)
• Another Google Search Result (Note: contains not a single usage of the word "Eamon".)
• Hmm. Give it a Whirl with a More Fun Search Engine? (I was feeling Ducky.)
• I Was Starting to Doubt the Existence of "Imagery!" (Relevant results at last!)
• Tour Ten Different Beginner's Caves (Each includes a hermit with poor hygiene, a "Limited Edition" TrollsFire and not less than three rats.)

July newsletter in August/Professional Unicorns/Benway Deluxe

The items mentioned in the title of this post all correspond to various projects from my overflowing work area this morning.

[Edit 8/13/2012: Apparently I forgot to add the links to the newsletter when I posted this. They are now included below as I had intended.]

The July 2012 issue of the Eamon Newsletter was finished around the end of July and silently posted (vision impaired users can go here for a plain text version) on the newsletter section of the Guild website a few days ago.

Since it's almost the middle of August, I figured I should finally get around to making an announcement on here. It contains eight pages of Eamon adventure reviews, including a few that were posted on the blog recently as well as new, previously unpublished reviews of the upgraded Eamon Deluxe "Beginner's Adventures" and each of the adventures contained within that set.


Headlining this issue, however, is another historical Eamon article by Thomas Ferguson regarding the rarely mentioned, "Eamon Pro" system for the Apple II. Thomas is certainly a master of his craft and I highly recommend his latest article to any Eamon fan.

Don't remember Eamon Pro? It's likely that very few people do (I was not even aware it existed until very recently).

Want to explore Eamon Pro for yourself? Be warned, disk images are not as easy to come by as the rest of the Apple II Eamon systems and are not currently available anywhere on the Guild site; nor will the disk images which can be found (through shrewd internet navigation) turn out to be an easy task to even get booted up and fully running. (I currently have a half completed set of standardized disk images that I have been modifying on the fly to run on any Apple II emulator. When the necessary modifications are finished these standardized images will be announced here and made available on the Guild website.)


Speaking of announcements, I was recently astounded as I realized it has been 18 years since the release of Adventure in Interzone. This summer (more or less) will mark the 15 year anniversary of the release of Eamon Deluxe 1.0 and the enhanced version of Adventure in Interzone that came with it.

While focusing on developing the Eamon Deluxe system and converting over 1/3 of the Classic Eamon library so far, I have long neglected my own entries into that library since the first Eamon Deluxe release. Recent play through left me very unsatisfied so I have decided to re-release all four of them in a new Deluxe package using the 5.0 system and further enhancing the entire set. This includes fixing up some areas of game play and also the addition of new routines and material.


Hopefully The Frank Black Adventures Deluxe will be finished within the next few months; I just started work on it today, however, so I'm not prepared to figure out a plausible release date at this point. Maybe September if I'm lucky? Maybe sooner. At this point it's as random as A.J.'s comments, or the Planet Eamon itself for that matter...

The PC Eamon Museum Now Open to the Public

The final Beta version of the PC Eamon Museum is now available for public download. Visit the Museum home page for the download links.

Also, as of today, everyone who signed up for the play tester list has been sent a message with instructions and a copy of the Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Beta to test. If you were on that list and did not get a message then please email me: eamondeluxe (at) gmail.com

Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Progress Update and New Adventure Announcement

I am pleased to announce that the long-awaited Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Beta installer is nearly ready for public release. Over the next few days I will be sending it to those who signed up to help play test Eamon Deluxe earlier this year. Depending upon what they report, a version should be available for public download in about a week or so. If you signed up for play testing and don't receive an email with a download link over the next couple of days, please send me a message: eamondeluxe (at) gmail.com

I am also happy to announce that a new Eamon Deluxe adventure, "Stronghold of Kahr-Dur", is in the final stages of testing right now. A stand alone version of it will be released within the next few days, along with a full review. Below are a few screenshots from it for your viewing pleasure. They were taken from multiple operating systems that are all running test copies of the new Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Beta.

Got Lamp?

http://www.getlamp.com/

The State of the (Eamon) Union address.

It's been a while since I posted about the progress of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 so I thought I should take care of that while I have a moment.

The current development status is very promising. A beta version of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 is in the works and it will include a limited public release that anyone can download and try out as well a full version that will be sent directly to those who volunteered to be play testers.

I originally predicted a stable version being released around the end of March and it's the middle of June. In the world of software creation, being a few months behind schedule is not too bad at all. Especially if that software is freeware which is created by a team of one in his frustratingly limited spare time.

Initially I hadn't planned to make as many revisions as I have ended up with. Every time I made improvements in one area, it made another area stick out as needing them too. Thus the Creeping Feature Creature slowly took over. It is well worth the extra workload and waiting period though as the potentially finished product is looking very nice and should be able to carry Eamon into the next decade with very little in the way of updates required.

I only have a handful of programs to revise before I can start to get everything in order to release the final beta, with a stable version soon to follow. It shouldn't be too much longer now, and I thank everyone for their patience. The beta release will include a fully functional OS X specific package for Mac users and I am planning on adding a new page to the Eamon Guild website with screen shots and helpful instructions for installing and running Eamon Deluxe on Windows, Mac and Debian based Linux.

Right now Eamon is around 30 years old, and I currently have a version of Eamon Deluxe which will run seamlessly on virtually any OS and/or hardware released in the last 20 years or so. Plus I have received two brand new, very well written adventures so far this year; which makes me ponder whether or not Eamon holds the title of the oldest and most versatile computer RPG system in the world? If not, it seems it should at least be in the top ten...