Re: Restoring Scott Adams adventures


Sun, 22 Oct 1995 05:49:16 GMT

jdyer@indirect.com (Jason Dyer) writes:

>I'm working on program to automatically convert a Scott Adams TRS-80
>file into Inform code, so all the rest of the games can be ported.

>Is this considered legal? I know both Pirate and Adventureland have
>been ported to other machines, but none of the others as far
>as I know.

I see nothing illegal about writing such a program. The details of
Adams' adventure "machine code" have been published in several
magazines (Softside and BYTE, for instance), and nobody's going to
go after you with a bunch of lawyers for using the knowledge gained
from reverse-engineering the game files. If that were true, Bruce
Hansen, author of The Adventure System (an Adams-compatible game
authoring package), would have been sued.

If you release the end-result of running your program on Scott's
data files, you're in a lot murkier water.

I haven't played any Inform games, but it seems to me there's a
basic problem: Scott's games were based on a split-screen display,
where the current location, visible exits, and objects were always
displayed at the top of the screen. They were updated after every
turn, and the player was expected to keep an eye on changes in
the upper window. Many of the games depended on this for their effect.
If Inform games work in the basic Infocom fashion, you'd have to start
adding special messages to tell people to do a "look" whenever anything
changed.

- David Librik
librik@cs.Berkeley.edu