Later's Always Better Than Never
Jan. 1st, 2018 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI often suppose one part of what motivates me to seek out information about the computers of the 1980s, one particular subject among a good many others, is the sense I was around at the time but not quite aware of a lot of things outside the amiable corner of the Radio Shack Color Computer. That sense can be carried too far, though. My related interest in the text adventure games dignified with the name interactive fiction does have something to do with my family having been given a copy of the Infocom adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which first made me aware of adventure games that could accept more than two words at a time and then suggested in a catalog there was a whole line of other games like it. The only problem was that the regular hints offered for the game in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow never quite explained how to solve its last and most elaborate puzzle. When I did manage to make out the faded hints in a high school acquaintance's old hint book, the sense of it being too late to play any other Infocom game was right to the extent of the re-release collections having less elaborate packaging and being for more elaborate computers.
There was an advantage to that, though. The Color Computer's hardware text display was all capitals and could show only 16 lines of 32 characters each, which was a crowded way to read the elaborate descriptions of the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure. When I discovered the game's transcript function printed out in upper and lower case (if still in an endless 32 character-wide column), I used up a good bit of fanfold printer paper stumbling through a fair bit of the game, but it was something to be able to play the other Infocom games in a slightly more refined way.
Years later again, when I managed to get some Color Computer emulator programs working, I discovered some people had taken advantage of Infocom programming their adventures to play in an earlier form of "virtual machine" and put together some disk images of games unavailable for that computer at the time. They were still stuck with the all-capitals, 32-by-16 screen, though. I wondered in an idle way if someone would get an interpreter program running for the Color Computer's optional and advanced if complicated operating system OS-9, but didn't suppose this would affect me one way or another.
After having put that thought out of my mind for quite a while, though, in one of my occasional visits to the archive of a Color Computer mailing list I noticed someone describing how he'd managed to modify the vintage Infocom interpreter to support a "64-column mode" in a recent piece of hardware for the original Color Computers. That was just about as academic as my old thoughts about OS-9, but then there were more messages about a similar thing being managed for the Color Computer 3's improved text screen. I wondered if this would work in the Color Computer 3 emulator ("adding additional hardware" to it would be that much more of a challenge for me than installing a physical kit), but when I downloaded the new disk images they did offer lower case text in Infocom adventures on the Color Computer at last. This is a very minor thing, of course, but I have to admit just the feeling of "another option" attracts some pleased attention from me.
There was an advantage to that, though. The Color Computer's hardware text display was all capitals and could show only 16 lines of 32 characters each, which was a crowded way to read the elaborate descriptions of the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure. When I discovered the game's transcript function printed out in upper and lower case (if still in an endless 32 character-wide column), I used up a good bit of fanfold printer paper stumbling through a fair bit of the game, but it was something to be able to play the other Infocom games in a slightly more refined way.
Years later again, when I managed to get some Color Computer emulator programs working, I discovered some people had taken advantage of Infocom programming their adventures to play in an earlier form of "virtual machine" and put together some disk images of games unavailable for that computer at the time. They were still stuck with the all-capitals, 32-by-16 screen, though. I wondered in an idle way if someone would get an interpreter program running for the Color Computer's optional and advanced if complicated operating system OS-9, but didn't suppose this would affect me one way or another.
After having put that thought out of my mind for quite a while, though, in one of my occasional visits to the archive of a Color Computer mailing list I noticed someone describing how he'd managed to modify the vintage Infocom interpreter to support a "64-column mode" in a recent piece of hardware for the original Color Computers. That was just about as academic as my old thoughts about OS-9, but then there were more messages about a similar thing being managed for the Color Computer 3's improved text screen. I wondered if this would work in the Color Computer 3 emulator ("adding additional hardware" to it would be that much more of a challenge for me than installing a physical kit), but when I downloaded the new disk images they did offer lower case text in Infocom adventures on the Color Computer at last. This is a very minor thing, of course, but I have to admit just the feeling of "another option" attracts some pleased attention from me.