Just a bunch of zorks.

[doomglobe]

jough do I know you? your avatar looks like a young picture of my cousin, who died recently but was extremely awesome in every way, and you must be like one of four or five people who ever played zork, myself included. man I wish I could play that again.

[jough]

Do I know you?  Are you from PA?

I of course am older now than I was in that picture, taken in 1981.

I loved Zork.  I played on my Commodore 64 and still remember the directions to get from the mailbox and into the house.

I have a copy of zork for the PC now, and for my palm pilot, which just rocks.  I never play it, but just knowing that it's on there is hellacool.

Sorry to hear about your cousin.  He must've been one handsome fellow.

[doomglobe]

Do I know you?  Are you from PA?

I of course am older now than I was in that picture, taken in 1981.

I loved Zork.  I played on my Commodore 64 and still remember the directions to get from the mailbox and into the house.

I have a copy of zork for the PC now, and for my palm pilot, which just rocks.  I never play it, but just knowing that it's on there is hellacool.

Sorry to hear about your cousin.  He must've been one handsome fellow.

yeah he was a handsome fellow, do you think you could send me zork for the pc? I played zork II and zork III, never just zork. zork III was incredibly hard, but the synonyms engine was really great at that point. I had them on those big ol floppy disks, for one of those old pc's where you had to boot the OS first off a floppy and then you could load your work or zork, or whatever. dang those disks could hold like 500 kilobytes or something.
edit: oh yeah and I am from massachusetts so I probably dont know you. too bad.

[AlohaDawg]

Also, could you point me toward the palm pilot version? that would be kind of fun although doing that much graffitti would probably suck.

[jough]

Well, I don't know how software belongs in the "Touches" forum, but okay.

Can't you people search for "Frotz" or "Frobitz" yourselves?  This is why Jesus invented Google.com, people.

I have no idea where to download these things.  I just Googled them and got them.  They're pretty easy to come by.

I did pay for the DOS version of Zork, but there's a bootleg version using the Frotz engine out there somewhere.  And you can change the colours so that it looks like the C64.

[jay-ell]

I figure any kind of interactive activity -- video games included -- is on some level a tactile experience.  Also, this is where the card games thread is, so it seemed logical...to me.

[doomglobe]

yeah I tried googling zork and got a bunch of nerd forums. I will try that forbitz or whatever in a minute, but first I have need of passing out.

[arlucasinc]

Hey, Jough!

Where in PA?

[jough]

My location is secret.  Like the batcave.

[jough]

Okay, here are some links.  It took me about 10 seconds apiece to find these in Google.  You people fuck*ng OWE me.

I use the Frotz interpreter, but I'm kind of a geek and like to play other IF (Interactive Fiction is what they're calling them now - back in my day we called them "Text Adventures") games and like to download new roms and stuff.

But if you just want to play the Zork Trilogy on the Windows, DOS, or Mac platform, go here:

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html

Here's a link to the Frotz home page - it's more feature rich and has macros to save you from having to type things repetitively:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/3222/frotz.html

Once you extract the zork.dat file from the above link, you can load it into frotz.

And a link to the Palm version, which you'll need to play the Palm rom:

http://www.freewarepalm.com/games/pilot-frotz.shtml

It comes with a converter to turn the zork.dat file into a PDB which you can load on your palm.

See the Frotz home page for many links to places to get roms and stuff.

It's decidedly low-tech, but damn if these IF games aren't so much better than anything graphical.  It's like one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels.

Remember those?

-- Jough

[CortJstr]

Ohhhh! Is Zork that game with the xyzzy magic word? I could never figure anything out and always just got stuck. I'm no good at text adventures. Or Nethack.

(btw, I'm from DuBois, which is near Punxy/Clearfield/Altoona)

[doomglobe]

WHOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO!
ZORK RULES SO MUCH! my favorite part is in zork three where you fight the shadowy figure and you just keep typing "kill figure".

[jough]

Sometimes he'll kill you, sometimes he'll steal your stuff.

It's particularly nasty if he takes your lamp.

See my location.

[slink]

I use the Frotz interpreter, but I'm kind of a geek and like to play other IF (Interactive Fiction is what they're calling them now - back in my day we called them "Text Adventures") games and like to download new roms and stuff.

It's decidedly low-tech, but damn if these IF games aren't so much better than anything graphical.  It's like one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels.

-- Jough

Wow, ages since I played any of the IF games. I think I played a bit of Zork I, but I really can't remember. I mainly got into the IF games years back for H2G2, but then got into some of the others. All the text based ones I played were things like Valhalla on the Speccy 48k (good old English youth).
Must go play some now!