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I've used Dosbox to emulate all of my companies legacy dos stuff we have to use. It works find with XP.

Every game I've tried it with works though most of mine are text based Remember T-Zero? http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/t.html#tzero all of Infocom's games.

I still play the ones I've not solved yet, I have all my notes.

The trouble is, when you put together an unoptimized, unscalable, hastily coded demo to prove the feasibility of something or to make a stopgap before the real version is available the code *lasts forever*. The real version doesn't come and hack is laid on top of hack to make the demo the real thing and you own it.

Had Inform 7 been developed in open source, I am fairly sure it would now be an elaborated version of the superficial prototype, and that it would be much the poorer. And it ought to be remembered that for at least the first year of the project, I wasn't at all sure it would ever work - "work" in the sense of being capable enough to be useful.

There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.

Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.

For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).

There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.

Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap

A good example of what will be easier to write in the next generation of interactive fiction is Galatea, and some of the worked examples that come with inform 7 really showcase its power. I defy you to read through the manual and not come up with an idea for at least one story to implement.

One great article I read that actually made me stop, reread the paragraph, and put down my pilot (I read it in plucker) and think about the implications was in SPAG issue 44. Another couple good articles are in http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7intro.html and http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/i7observa tions.html . Without spoiling the latter article, I'll mention that one of the paragraphs under the 'relations' section blew my mind.

A good example of what will be easier to write in the next generation of interactive fiction is Galatea, and some of the worked examples that come with inform 7 really showcase its power. I defy you to read through the manual and not come up with an idea for at least one story to implement.

One great article I read that actually made me stop, reread the paragraph, and put down my pilot (I read it in plucker) and think about the implications was in SPAG issue 44. Another couple good articles are in http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7intro.html and http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/i7observa tions.html . Without spoiling the latter article, I'll mention that one of the paragraphs under the 'relations' section blew my mind.

Also, she wrote these games in GAGS which compatible with AGT but a much more limited parser. Of course, nowadays I'd suggest Inform or TADS.

They died? Oh no! You mean no more updates to some of my favourite websites?

Yes, definitely, try IF.

The IF archive is a bit unruly, if comprehensive.

Some links I like are

Baf's guide to the IF archive A nice site with reviews of games in the IF archive.

SPAG SPAG is an online zine about IF. It's got a a scoreboard that sadly isn't updated anymore, but gives a rough guide to better IF games out there. SPAG has a numerous reviews of IF games that are generally more thorough than Baf's guide, but are therefore not always good for a quick read.

XYZZY News is probably the best site for up to date news, reviews, and links about IF. If you want a good starting place for IF, this is it.

iFiction is a good site to get IF games. It's not as comprehensive as the IF archives, and it's getting a little out of date, but it's generally well organized and is a good place to go if you want to filter out some of the less polished games.

I didn't care for Varicella, I will admit it is well written. My favorite work so far is probably Anchorhead. It's a horror piece with a sort of Lovecraftian-Northeast Atlantic-Jamesian feel. But there's plenty of great stuff out there.

Sorry for the offtopicness, but does anyone remember Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia? That was probably one of the best written (and definitely the longest) text games I've played.

The company is offering them royalties if they put their games under contract, and the authors aren't sure they want their games sold like that, since they're used to giving them away.

A few years ago, the interactive fiction community started doing annual competitions. This, combined with the availability of a language called INFORM, has helped to generate a variety of game s of exceedingly high quality. (There are, of course, some real stinkers.) I've seen a few comments to the effect that "Infocom is all anyone needs". The people who believe that haven't examined the current crop. The only thing Infocom (or Magnetic Scrolls, or Scott Adams :-) has on some of the current games is nostalgia.

These games have been available for free for years from here. This company wants to make these games available through their service, and pay the authors royalties. What should the authors watch out for? What should they keep in mind? Does /. have any real input for them?

If you're interested in this sort of thing:

• rec.arts.int-fiction
• rec.games.int-fiction
• textfire.com
• SPAG
• Stephen Granade's IF Page

That should get you started. There's a LOT of good stuff out there.