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Welcome to another edition of
">REMEMBER", my newsletter on retro text adventures! I hope everyone
had a good break over the holidays, and that you're ready to make 2021 a
much better year than 2020!
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My news
I took a break over the holidays too, which means I don't have too much to report 🙂 Tristam Island did appear in a few more places, including Juiced.GS, the Apple II magazine, and issue #1 of Amiga Addict, a new Amiga magazine. It also picked up a few more 5-star reviews, on IFDB, and on itch.io.
(Ratings are very important on itch.io, as a good rating allows the
game to show up in more recommendations! If you haven't yet... 😉) And
I've also started the French translation! There's quite a few French
Amstrad CPC fans looking forward to a new full-size adventure for their
machine... 🙂
I also finished a project that is not a retro text adventure: a visual novel-style
game for mobile with a sci-fi theme, which will come out as a launch
title on the upcoming Ludogram app. A refreshing change in format and a
cool project, and it's nice for once to have some graphics in my game!
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Community news
There's quite a bit to talk about this month, actually! And please let me know if I forgot to include something!
- Johan Berntsson and Fredrik Ramsberg have announced
Release 5 of Ozmoo, their interpreter for Infocom's Z-Machine format.
The biggest change: the Commodore Plus/4 and Commodore 128 are now
supported! I know they worked very hard to make it a very polished
release that uses all the functionalities of these computers - including
the C128's expanded memory and 80 column mode. Once again, amazing job
by these two!
- More tool-related news: DAAD tools got an update by Uto this month! The DRC compiler got an upgrade, with a few bugs fixed; Triz2DAAD, a tool to convert Trizbort-format maps into DAAD code, was updated too; and MALUVA, the tool allowing one to insert pictures in their game, got a few bug fixes! Thanks Uto!
- Stefan Vogt has announced a remaster of Hibernated 1,
recoding the game with PunyInform for the Z-Machine; this allows him to
target more platforms, and get more room to add back some of the
puzzles and content he had to cut in his already-great game!
- Davide Bucci is still working on Silk Dust, his multi-platform retro text adventure. It has a gorgeous Art Nouveau feel - no wonder, since it's a sequel to The Queen's Footsteps! (Which by the way he has now ported to the Apple II and Atari 800!)
- There is still a few more days to vote in the Adventuron Christmas Jam!
- Historical news! Some messages from Don Woods from 1977 have been recovered, which sheds more light on the timeline of several versions of Adventure!
- You might be interested in this article
by Švelch and Kouba, in which they detail the process behind their
conversion of Tchekoslovakian text adventures, which were suprisingly
popular and influential on a political level. They even translated one
to English - you can now play Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in your browser!!
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This month's article
Last month, we had a historical article on the forgotten French translation of Mystery House,
Sierra On-Line's first game. This month, I'm changing track, and give
you a historical article, on the topic of text compression in retro
adventure games! Squishing the text's size was crucial to getting
everything to fit on disk or tape; we take a look at Infocom's way,
since it's the one with the most extensive documentation (and the one
I'm most familiar with), but we also talk about Level-9's system! I hope
you enjoy it 😀
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See you soon!
I hope you've enjoyed this second issue! Don't hesitate to let me know
by replying to this email, or on Twitter 🙂 And please spread the word
around, and tell your friends and your communities, to help it grow!
Thank you, and see you next month!
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