The Continuing Story of Imagery! for the Commodore 64

The second part of Kent Sullivan's excellent retrospective on Dr. Evil Laboratories' Imagery! for the Commodore 64 has been posted at commodoreserver.com. Just as in the first installment, one need not be an 8-bit computer aficionado to appreciate the post; just about anyone will find something to enjoy in Kent's narrative.

In addition to Kent's musings- which are reason enough to visit the Dr. Evil Laboratories blog- he's included a great deal of memorabilia, including the sole issue of Imagery!'s newsletter- The Image- and the original Adventure Designer's Manual for the system. 

I can hear the reader ask himself or herself: "Oh, but why would I need a copy of the Adventure Designer's Manual?" The answer is simple: it's nice to have a reference manual while writing Imagery! adventures.

Yes, twenty five years after its initial release, Dr. Evil Laboratories co-conspirator Ray Moody has produced Version 1.1 of the Imagery! Adventure Designer Disk, copies of which are available for download from the blog itself. Kent has issued a modest call for interested authors to give Imagery! a try. And if Apple II text adventure development is having a renaissance, there's no reason that the same shouldn't hold for the Commodore 64 as well. (It really is an excellent system, after all, with many of its improvements on Eamon's formula hitting the mark.)

I'm flirting with putting the Adventure Designer Disk to good use... perhaps someone here is willing to beat me to the punch and steal the glory of authoring Imagery! Adventure #2. But you'll never get there if you don't visit the post.

A Strange, Commercial Eamon for the Apple II

A little more Eamon archaeology. Back in 1985, a company named "Load'N'Go," a subsidiary of "Green River Publishing," itself a subsidiary of "ShareData," released to great fanfare (or not) The Adventurer Series, a series of games for the Apple II essentially repackaging Eamon. At this time, Eamon was primarily distributed commercially through public domain houses like 3A, and this seems totally legitimate to me. What is borderline insidious about The Adventurer Series is its methodical excision of every trace of its creators.

This is the story about how Eamon literally made its way onto store shelves without Donald Brown (or any other Eamon author) making a cent.

The "authors" of The Adventurer Series didn't merely remove Brown's name and call it a day. In order to make this work "original," there are some changes and "enhancements." Care was taken to revise the weapon abilities in an unusual fashion; the "spear" becomes a "pole arm" and the "sword" category becomes "slashing." Some of the changes are inexplicable; the command "drink" becomes "quaff" and "ready" becomes "prepare." Likewise, while the Load'N'Go Beginner's Cave maintains the map of the standard one, the descriptions are methodically rewritten with the one original contribution being some odd references to a mythical "Lord Gumby" (don't ask me to explain). Playing through its Beginner's Cave feels like reading a research paper by a knucklehead freshman plagiarist.

The interface is, to be fair, significantly revamped. Like Bill Martens' modified Eamons displaying a player's stats (which works well and deserves to be checked out), The Adventure Series seeks to display relevant statistics constantly during the game. In practice, though, the execution of this feature is clunky, taking up over half of the screen, leaving the player with effectively an 18 column display. (If the jump from 40 columns to 80 columns is a significant leap, then this represents an even more significant leap backwards.)

As far as I can tell from an advertisement in the May 1986 issue of Family Computing, there were three disks released: The Beginner's Cave, Cave of the Mind, and River Adventure, a rebranded Zyphur Riverventure.

Disk images of the first are abundant; I'm unable to locate the latter two but I presume they fall into the same plagiarist tradition of the former (though there is through November 19th, 2012 an ebay auction for the third disk; I don't have the $20 to buy it but I'll buy a drink to anyone who grabs a disk image). It looks as though someone picked up the item. The offer still stands, though; I'll buy a drink to anyone who gets me a disk image.

We do have the box art for River Adventure though that for Cave of the Mind is not available. Looking at the box art further suggests that the adventure closely follows the Jim Jacobson classic.

Unlike some of the recent Apple II finds like Eamon Pro, The Adventurer wasn't "lost" (at least the main disk wasn't). It's been hiding in plain sight all along. Indeed, there's a playthrough of The Adventurer Series in the "Let's Play" style up on Youtube right now:

If the reader's thirst is whetted by this video and wants some pure Load'N'Go action for him or herself, the disk image for the first disk can be downloaded at apple2.org. The source of the art for The Beginner's Cave is the quite excellent Museum of Computer Adventure Game History at www.mocagh.org and the source for the art from River Adventure is the site www.thelegacy.de.

Updated to include River Adventure box art 11-18-12.

Beagle Bros Throwback Included in Imminent Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Public Release

I am happy to announce that an open Beta version of the new Eamon Deluxe 5.0 system will be available for public download any day now. I'm just polishing up a few loose ends and waiting for program verifications from a few play testers that use certain computer setups which I don't currently have access to and can't test myself. The open Beta release of Eamon Deluxe will also be cross-platform, with versions available to Windows, OSX and Linux users alike.

I am also happy to announce that I contacted the DOSBox Team regarding bundling and distribution, and included a beta copy Eamon Deluxe for them to preview. I promptly received a response from Peter Veenstra, the original creator of DOSBox. Not only was Peter's message helpful, but it was also very positive and complimentary regarding his opinion of the Eamon Deluxe system overall.

The release of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 will be announced on this blog, hopefully within the next few days or so. In the meantime you can check out the freshly published Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Player's Manual which includes a lot of new material, including an expanded historical section and fun new additions to the cannon of Eamon lore. An indexed web version is available where the previous manual resided on the Eamon Guild website and also available in a nice PDF format (courtesy of Thomas Ferguson).

Now, on a somewhat related subject, I'm sure many former Apple II users remember the Beagle Bros software company. I was, and still am, a big fan of everything about them. Their products were excellent, their staff was brilliant and their company look, style and attitude was fun and refreshing. I still use some of their programs to this day, particularly when recovering or repairing the oddball "lost" Eamon related disk images that Thomas Ferguson keeps digging up from the bowels of the interwebs.

Last summer, after discovering that my kids really liked playing the game "Hang Person" from the "Beagle Bag" games disk, I decided to start a side project and make an attempt to convert it to the PC platform. In my typical side project fashion, I made it to the "mostly finished" point and then promptly forgot about it.

As a tribute to the Beagles, and just for fun, I recently finished it up and incorporated it into Eamon Deluxe 5.0 as an available option on the Adventure Design Menu. Tired of editing monsters and artifacts? Need a break from entering your new adventure? Can't think of any clever answers to add to your adventure's HINTS file? Take a break, and play some Hang Person!

 Because of the differences in video hardware between the Apple II and the PC, and primarily because the PC doesn't even have a "LORES graphics" screen mode, the poor fella being hung may look a little distorted from his original form on the Apple II.

But, hey, you have to admit that this is a pretty authentic conversion. I made only a few minor changes and fixed an annoying bug in the original version (it didn't keep track of what letters had already been tried) along the way. I even included an option that allows switching the screen mode to 40 columns (which makes the gentleman in the gallows look a little less distorted).

Does adding Hang Person  as an Adventure Design Menu option sound random? I think it does. The odd inclusion in question was partially inspired by one of my favorite Debian Linux programs, "Aptitude". Aptitude is a powerful terminal (text only) based program for managing the programs that make up a Linux operating system. Among the various tools of package management, Aptitude's menu includes, quite randomly, an option to play Minesweeper. I was extremely amused when I discovered this, and it still makes me smile to this day.

Cheers,
-Frank

A Trip Through Darrel Raines' Eamon IIGS Demo

I learned of the Apple IIGS HyperCard Eamon by reading old copies of GEnie Lamp; there was a discussion between a staff writer, Darrel Raines, and the EAG's Tom Zuchowski concerning the former's attempt to bring Eamon to the IIGS. Over this discussion, the HyperCard Eamon was held up as the paradigm of how not to port Eamon.

I'd presumed that Darrel Raines grew frustrated and had ultimately abandoned his attempt... and this indeed appears to be the case. But he also left behind an artifact, his "tech demo" of what his envisioned port would look like.

Inasmuch as the user's only option is to continually hit the spacebar (it is a mere demo, after all), I thought that rather than making the reader track down the file, extract the folder from the .BXY file, convert the folder to a .PO file, mount the .PO file in the IIGS emulator... (you get the picture), I'd post the entire tour here. (The reader can hit the spacebar at appointed times for effect as he or she scrolls down, of course.)

For one, Eamon IIGS has the coolest dragon ever to grace an Eamon splash screen (though that of the the Atari 800 port certainly gives it a run for its money). It's worth the price of admission for that alone. (Oh, and click on the Atari 800 link. Really. And bring your snorkel because you'll be swimming in awesome.)

Eamon IIGS appears intended as a more modest effort than Hypercard Eamon, its graphical capabilities limited to a discrete window. The demo also sees the adventurer walking blindly into a cave in true Eamon fashion. Because there's nothing a Free Adventurer likes more than walking blindly into a cave.

And the adventurer immediately finds a unicorn playing a bit of a "white rabbit" role, luring the player deeper. Why unicorns seem so popular in Eamon ports is beyond me (cf. Eamon Pro). Why they hang out in caves is even less clear. Then again, why Free Adventurers hang out in caves is itself obscure.

Unicorns and vampires in one cave!?! It's like a mythological creature overdose! Only with the inclusion of ninjas and an Archie Shepp soundtrack could this cave get any cooler. Sadly, the demo is drawing to a close.

And a goblin from the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit (points for style!) ends the demo on a cliffhanger, saving the adventurer from the vampire and entreating him or her on a quest of some sort. Perhaps to wrangle that runaway unicorn? The world may never know.

So here is the cosmic conundrum: on the one hand we have HyperCard Eamon, which is complete yet entirely broken, and on the other we have Eamon IIGS, which works as intended but is utterly incomplete. I don't know a lick about programming a IIGS (I don't know a lick about programming in general, either) but perhaps this is an indication that it was really difficult? To go further would be to needlessly speculate. There's your tour.

Unrelated note: "Tenement of the Damned" really exists, I promise. Frank Black wanted to put a layer of polish on it before stamping it and releasing it into the wild.

Update: I make no warranties, as the site is not working for me at the moment, but the source of the file, titled "eamon2.gs.bxy," is here.  Wade Clarke suggests in the comments that the site whence I discovered the file may be down for some time; for those wishing to tinker with the file, it has a home for the time being at http://www.filedropper.com/eamon2gs.

Announcing Eamon #255: Tenement of the Damned

I'm very happy to announce that Eamon #255 "Tenement of the Damned" has been completed and an initial copy can be downloaded here. [Edit: In preparation for the official .DSK being posted, the download link is removed.] Frank Black was able to recover the entirety of the French program and I, in turn, translated it into English using the 6.2 Dungeon Designer Diskette. ("Maudit" is Version 6 and I felt that the English version ought to approximate the French experience as much as possible.) Finally, a menu was put in giving players the option of playing the game in either French or in English. 

Now, "Tenement of the Damned," an adventure oriented towards looting a crumbling public housing block, is not exactly Sam Ruby-caliber. (Indeed, that Frank Black salvaged the MAIN PGM was a bit of an anticlimax as there is no special programming to speak of.) The most it musters by way of puzzles is a pair of secret rooms, a hidden artifact, and some hunting for keys. The goal is simply to find friends and lay waste the the rest of the tenement... there isn't even an introduction at the beginning of the adventure.

On the other hand, it's certainly not "Sam"-caliber either. While it is effectively the French analogue of the "Beginner's Cave" and its premise and execution are similarly simple, the descriptions tend to be rich and witty and the map, though relatively small, invites exploration. The characters and artifacts you'll encounter are all colorful and wacky. The general mood, tending towards the absurd, is most similar to the charm of the great, old Jim Jacobson adventures such as "Cave of the Mind." There are bouts of self-reference, fourth-wall-breaking, and Monty Python-esque humor, making for a consistently enjoyable adventure.

An official .DSK of the dual English/French version ought to be posted soon. I plan on writing a more lengthy review in the next issue of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter. Who would have thought that brushing up on one's French (or English, as the case may be) could be so much fun? 

Apple II Eamon "Le HLM Maudit" ("The Tenement of the Damned")

So in my first post for this blog, I described what I knew about the French conversion of Eamon for the Apple II and immediately began seeking disk images. While I was hoping that they'd be out there, I suspected that what would turn up was a run-of-the-mill Main Hall with a Beginner's Cave merely translated into French. (Did you know that "pirate" is French for pirate?)

But what we got was something entirely different: "Le HLM Maudit," or (with some license in translation), "The Tenement of the Damned," written by J.M. Menassanch. ("HLM" denotes a particular type of subsidized housing and "Maudit" as an adjective means "cursed" or "damned.") It appears to be a short, twenty room romp through the banlieues, with a handful of monsters and written for beginners.

In full disclosure, two points ought to be mentioned. For one, well, it's in French. Moreover, there is a bit of corruption in the disk image that must be sorted out. While the data is all intact, the Main Program has taken a beating. With only one effect, though, I imagine that this obstacle can be overcome relatively easily with some backwards engineering. Stay tuned as I hope to have a translated, working .DSK available soon.

I'm very grateful to Jean-Marc Boutillon of boutillon.free.fr and Arnaud Brossard of apple-iigs.info, both of whom put up with my much-atrophied French and provided much help in securing the disk images.

An additional expression of gratitude is in order. If the reader looks over to the side bar, the reader will notice that this is the thirty fifth post this year. Applying a bit of arithmetic, the reader will also note that were precisely thirty five posts from the site's conception in 2004 through 2011. There's now been as much activity this year as the previous seven years combined. To everyone who has contributed and made this such a good year for Eamon, you all have my gratitude as well.

Updated to reflect the name of the adventure's author.

Glimpse into "Bird's Paradise," a Lost Eamon...

The internet-trawling I've done in search of lost Eamons this past year has been rather fruitful, with quite a few disk images recovered. Sadly, sometimes "lost" really means "lost." But I find that in focusing on the recovery of disk images, it's easy to miss the important feature of Eamon: the stories that are told. Truth be told, I think being told about the content of a lost adventure is just as good as finding it.

Paul Balyoz has been kind enough to share his recollections of such an Eamon, an adventure he wrote titled "Bird's Paradise," and has graciously allowed me to share it here:

As I recall, playing Bird's Paradise went sort of like this: You started in your apartment up high in an apartment building, and in one room there was a bird cage with a bird, like a Parrot. He was... [a] "friend", so he would follow you around throughout the game and not attack you (unless you attacked him first). Exploring your house you realize there is an open window, so you go out the window and onto the ledge. Walking along the ledge you can go in the open window of the apartment next to you, and there's a different bird in there - I think it was a Toucan. The Toucan is your friend too, and follows you around. Now you have two friends.

At the end of the level you confronted the enemy - an Evil Bird King and four ravens, I think, who immediately start attacking! It's a giant epic melee, you and your four friends attacking the evil birds alongside you... [S]ince you have friends who are attacking the enemy, the enemies would not just focus on you - everyone gets one "swing" per turn, and so you'd be swung-at about 1/5th of the time (because you have 4 other pals). The odds were in your favor, but you could still die, just due to random occurrence of being attacked more than normal; or being too novice of a character. 

Paul was also generous enough to provide a related anecdote which will be humorous to any veteran Eamonaut:

I was all proud of my Eamon adventure and played it a few times before unleashing it on the world. A day or two later I invited a friend over to play it. He had a pretty advanced character that I felt would probably survive the end-battle that I didn't tell him about. He had fun playing it - then, when he got to the epic battle he did something I never thought of - the room happened to be a four-way intersection, so he typed "flee" and fled to another room! He did that over and over again, until only one enemy was in the room with him - then he'd attack that monster until it was dead, go back and do it again! "Hey," I said, "that's cheating!" Later I realized, no, it's just an advanced strategy when playing Eamon adventures. 

Paul's blog can be found at paulio10.wordpress.com and is filled with interesting reflections on myriad topics. In particular, the original post that led me to contact him is a charming and sincere meditation on memory and is well worth a read.