Adventure Writing Utility News From Bill Hoggett TADS is now freeware -------------------- The latest news about TADS is that Michael Roberts has released not just TADS, Ditch and Deep Space Drifter and Perdition's Flames but also the TADS source code. This still has a few bugs and Dave Baggett (of Adventions fame) is about to release the de-bugged source very soon. This is the source for TADS version 2.2.1 so it's an upgrade. Ports to all the usual platforms will no doubt soon follow. The updated manual has also been released and is available in TeX, HTML and ASCII format so far. Inform v6 now out of beta ------------------------- TADS greatest rival, Inform, has now reached version 6.05. Written by Graham Nelson, Inform produces Z-machine game files, of similar format to Infocom adventures. Inform and its documentation have been freeware from the beginning and there are versions for most modern computers and operating systems, including PC, Unix, Amiga, Apple Macintosh and Atari ST. The ST conversions are slightly behind the rest in that the latest conversion for it is version 6.03. Frotz now the top Infocom/Inform interpreter for PC and Amiga. -------------------------------------------------------------- Probably. --------- Frotz version 2.01 is possibly the newest and best of the Z- machine interpreters. Written by Stefan Jokisch it's available for PC (both DOS and Windows), Unix, Amiga and even OS/2. The Amiga version features a neat Graphic User Interface and allows most aspects of the game's presentation to be customised. Not surprisingly, the Amiga version was ported by David Kinder, the master porter. For Atari ST owners, the best alternative is probably JZip by John Holder. Hugo 2.2a update ---------------- Hugo, the newest of the 'major' adventure compilers like Inform and TADS, has had another update. Hugo is available for the PC, Archimedes, Linux, and Amiga and boasts better, although more rigid structuring than its main rivals. Games written in Hugo are few and far between, probably because most people are already using TADS or Inform, but new titles are rumoured to be in development. Let's hope we see them soon. Level 9 and universal AGT interpreters released ----------------------------------------------- Two more interpreters have recently made their mark in interactive fiction (The posh expression for text adventures) circles. Glen Summers' Level 9 interpreter, now at version 2, can play all Level 9 games except the very early release of the Middle-Earth trilogy, as it was then called. The program works by reading the data from Spectrum .Z80 type snapshots or Atari, C64 or Amiga data files. It does not support graphics, but with Spectrum snapshots widely available in the Public Domain, it allows the playing of these old classics in native mode on Amigas and PCs. So much for Mike Austin's opinion that it couldn't be done! The second of the new interpreters is Robert Masenten's AGiliTy , currently still in beta (version 0.3), an interpreter for all games created with AGT, no matter what version. This is a godsend to those who have not got all the various versions of AGT converted to their machines, with AGiliTy being available for PCs, Amiga and Linux. - o -