Psion Infocom Interpreter for 3 and 3a
               Authored by Bryan Scattergood
         (Part of Disk 813 and on this issue's disk)

                      Reviewed by Sue

Going on holiday in a motor caravan seemed an ideal time to do a
bit of adventuring. I could just imagine it ... away from the
hustle and bustle, relaxing in a camp chair on an isolated site,
lovely weather, glass of wine ... mmmm. And as I still have a
number of Infocom adventures to finish, I decided the time had
come for me to roll up my sleeves, put on my 'clever' head, and
set up the Psion Infocom Interpreter that Richard Hewison had sent
in to the library six years ago. It also runs Inform games, I
gather, because the author talks about running Curses as a test,
but I haven't yet tried those.

The interpreter will run on a 3 or a 3a (I've got the latter) so
long as they have either FlashRAM or 256K to run. No problem
there. I did, however, have a few problems setting it up and I did
quite a bit of flailing around before I was rewarded with the
loading screen. The set up is this - copy the interpreter into the
\APP directory on the M drive of the Psion, which I did using
WinLink, then run Install App. This creates a separate fonts
folder.  Now you need to create a folder for your game files and
another for saves. This is where I hit problems despite reading
the documentation - the answer is that you must create a folder
called IDF to hold the Infocom Data Files (logical) and another
called SAV for your saves. These must both be in the root
directory of M.

The Infocom data files are basic PC version DAT files, renamed as
IDF files. These are quite large so I only copied one onto my
Psion, Zork 1. I've done all the later Zorks but not that one so
it seemed a good first choice. The data file for that game is 82K
and I also found that I had to exit most of the other applications
and free up enough memory so that it would run. They estimate you
need between 70 and 90K free. The icon on the screen is an
inviting half open door and I was really thrilled when I ran it
and saw the magical words ...
     West of House
     You are standing in an open field west of a white house...

appear on the screen. Pressing the Menu key allows you to save,
restore, input your registration key (Version 1.8m is shareware),
set preferences (font, size and justification etc), tune memory
use and zoom in and out.

The program runs very well and though I haven't got very far into
the game yet, I'm enjoying playing it at long last. There is no
restriction on the program's distribution and as it doesn't take
much space, I've put it on this issue's disk as I know several of
you have got Psions. It will apparently also run on the Acorn
Archimedes and the Acorn Pocketbook.  You'll have to provide your
own data files. The only Infocoms which are in the public domain
are the first 3 Zorks and those are on Disk 1182.



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