Brave beta testers are sought. I would be grateful for any input
or error reports, especially on how Scott2Zip manages the "real"
Scott Adams adventures in the TRS-80 format.
I have the Scott Adams adventures only in the TI-99/4 format, and
have translated most of them and played Strange Odyssey to the end.
In the TRS-80 format, I have what I've found at GMD,
i.e. the public-domain versions of Pirate and Adventureland, and all
of Brian Howart's adventures. I have translated some of them, but
so far I have played none to the end.
Here is the README file:
Scott2Zip, version 0.90-beta
----------------------------
Here is the first version of Scott2Zip, a converter of the
classic Scott Adams adventures to Inform source code.
The original adventure can be either in the TRS-80
or TI-99/4 format. Note that Brian Howart's adventures, which
are free and can be found at GMD, can also be translated by
Scott2Zip.
Note that the Scott Adams adventures are still copyrighted.
The translated version obtained by Scott2Zip is for your personal
use only; it must not be distributed to others in any way.
To use Scott2Zip, you'll need:
* Perl 4.036
* Inform 5.5 (no library needed)
* An adventure in the TRS-80 format
* A good Z-machine interpreter, for instance Zip
There are versions of Perl available for most operating systems,
including Unix, MS-DOS, and VMS.
Do like this to convert an adventure:
scott2zip pirate.dat > pirate.inf
inform pirate.inf
The translated adventures have a few meta-commands. These are
documented in the translated adventure itself.
Scott2Zip is provided under the GNU General Public License.
For further information, see the start of the scott2zip program and
the file COPYING.
Bug reports and suggestions can be sent to the address found below.
Known misfeatures
-----------------
Note that this beta version has not been tested extensively.
Therefore, there are probably bugs in it.
The following minor misfeatures are known and will be corrected
in a future release.
* Since the current version Inform does not allow dictionary words
starting with digits, Scott2Zip automatically insert the letter
'd' before any digits in dictionary words.
That means that when you have to type digits in 'Pirate Adventure'
or 'The Count', you must prefix them with a 'd'.
* Items in inventory listings are listed in essentially random
order (depending on the order in which the items were picked up).
In contrast, in the original game drivers, the items were always
listed in item-number order. Some games depend on this order.
In 'Strange Odyssey', for instance, there is a 'space suit' item
and a 'which I'm wearing' item, which must be listed next to each
other when the space suit is worn.
* The error reporting if the original adventure file is corrupt
could be better -- the line number reported is most likely not
the correct one.
Credits
-------
For help to understand the TRS-80 format, thanks to Paul David Doherty,
who wrote the decompiler ScottDec, and to Alan Cox, who wrote the game
driver ScottFree.
Thanks to Graham Nelson, for creating Inform, and for documenting
the Z-machine.
Thanks to Graham Nelson and Gareth Rees, for suggesting how
word-wrapping in the upper window could be done.
Bjorn Gustavsson
ermbgus@at.ericsson.se