The lost delights and challenges of type-in programs

I was reminded of the delights and challenges of type-in programs from decades past - listings printed in books and magazines for the reader to type in at home - which I suppose could be considered an ultra-low-bandwidth, high-error-rate method of software transmission via the printed page, eyeballs, and fingers - by this tweet about old computer magazines: https://twitter.com/cyb3rops/status/1476122483308875778 ...

12 Jan 2022 · 5 min · 1025 words · Terry

A Mini adventure in Inform 7

I recently discovered Inform 7, a tool for creating text adventure games easily in (semi-)natural English - in this article we see how Inform 7 can be used to implement a small text adventure, and some interesting features of the language along the way. The game is based on MINI, an example adventure in Peter Killworth’s How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (1984). And, after the discussions on how to fit games into small amounts of RAM in my previous article, we shall see how the size of the game varies between BBC BASIC and Inform 7. ...

14 May 2021 · 14 min · 2904 words · Terry