I'm pleased to announce the upcoming release of a new game for Oric Atmos / Telestrat! The game is "Tristam Island", an Infocom-style text adventure. Here's a quick pitch:
After a plane crash, you wash up on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean... and find out it used to be inhabited! But why did everyone leave? And what secrets lie in the white house at the top of the hill?
I managed to make it work in an emulator using Pinforic yesterday, with help from Fabrice and Chema (thanks!). There will be a digital release on itch.io, and possibly a physical release (I haven't asked my publisher yet, but it should be doable. Is there is any interest? Anyone here would like a boxed set containing the disks and some feelies, just like Infocom used to do? )
I'm also going to talk a little bit about the tools I used, for anyone interested in writing their own text adventures for the Oric.
I used Inform 6 to create the game; Inform 6 allows you to create a Z-machine file that can be read by Infocom interpreters, but until recently the output to Z-Machine v3 (the one read by Pinforic, and all the other early 80s computers) was broken. It was fixed a few months ago, so you can use version 6.34 of the I6 compiler (source here) to write a ".z3" game.
I also use the library PunyInform, a brand-new compact library that only takes 25kb of space (instead of 50-60k in the standard Inform 6 library); this leaves over 100kb for the code and the text (no pictures, though!).
Once you have the z3 file, you need to put it on a physical disk; or if you want to use it in an emulator, you need to use raw2mfm to convert the MS-DOS formatted disk into an "Euphoria style" disk. My script on Linux is as follows:
The source for raw2mfm can be found on sourceforge, but it's a rather old version; Fabrice gave me a newer version that compiles without a problem with gcc. (I'll let him put it here?)mkdosfs -C tristam-oric.dsk 360
cp STORY.DAT TRISTAM.DAT
mcopy -i tristam-oric.dsk TRISTAM.DAT ::TRISTAM.DAT
raw2mfm tristam-oric.dsk
Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope that you are as excited as me about this upcoming release