Hey Community, I hope you are doing well. I have an announcement to make that is too important to not break my current IF hiatus. Some of you that are closer to me might know that I’ve been in touch with Mike Austin from Level 9 since 2022 and we discussed about releasing the A-Code compiler, the game sources, specs and pretty much the complete Level 9 archive to the public.
And Mike started digitalizing the content from the Level 9 archive. A massive archive of around 1000 disks. From these, around 500 are now digitalized, so there is still work to do, but the essentials are now already preserved. Mike has decided to make everything he has done so far publicly available, while he continues to work on it. The sources of the A-Code compiler are there, sources of many Level 9 games, Knight Orc for example, Documentation and Specs, pretty much everything. You can access the Level 9 archive here: GitHub - MikeTheTechie/Level9-Public
Needless to say, another important part of interactive fiction history is finally preserved. And we are curious to see where you take this. Long live A-Code.
Yes, this is very exciting news! Thank you for your role in this.
Let me just slightly rephrase what I wrote on Mastodon: As far as I can see, these are almost all the games, with the exception of the non-adventure games (Champion of the Raj, Billy the Kid) and the choice games (Adrian Mole, The Archers). Other than those, I think only Emerald Isle and Erik the Viking are missing. For the missing games, I suspect that license issues are the main issue, so we might not see those games for a while.
The Level 9 archive is based on around 1000 floppy disks from various systems which were preserved from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of these, about 500 were successfully read between 2021 and 2024, mainly using an Atari ST emulator running on a PC.
This GitHub repo is a work in progress. Here are some of the folders which I have processed so far.
So, I can’t honestly exclude that the missing IFs are in the ~500 out of ~1000 disks still to be read.
Let’s monitor the repo… (bookmarked here, of course )
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
ps. of course, I concur & second Zarf’s assessment. Digging into the mass of primary sources…
I suppose this will make it possible to play most Level 9 games legally using a free level 9 interpreter.
Hopefully, this will result in more reviews of these classic games, at least the later titles which had a more modern parser on par with Infocom. I suppose Knight Orc is an edge case and then the later titles had a strong parser.
Since I know that I know nothing about these tools…
What are the pieces here? There’s a README note about the “acode compiler, squasher and interpreters”. Is the “squasher” the tool that turns a compiled game into an Atari/whatever disk image?
Is “sys sources/PC huge” the compiler?
(I know that there’s a big pile of floppies under “floppy disk archive” which have not been sorted or organized.)
Finally! I’ve always been really curious about Level 9’s development tools. Maybe part of it was that I lived close to Wycombe when Level 9 were located there, so it was a local company. A big part of it was amazement at how much text Colossal crammed into a 32KiB home computer. Now decades later I get to peek at what was going on.
The fact that the descriptions and the parser dictionary are one and the same — that words are marked in the description to automatically make them recognizable by the parser — is a clever approach that must have saved literally dozens of bytes
While we wait for Mike’s answer (or more tools to be available), the manual under “docs/” gives some hints: the squasher is the program that compresses the texts into the “SQUASH.DAT” files contained in the folders for the different machines.
I think that the “PC huge” folder is not yet complete, or at least the PC process was structured differently from the Atari ST process. The manual talks about a “c” command on the ST, but there is no “c.asm”, “c.exe” or “c.bat” contained, so it’s possibly missing. But you might be right that “huge.exe” is the actual compiler for PC.
I’m certainly looking forward to more docs becoming available!
Roberto Colnaghi reminded me about the 2012 Digital Antiquarian post, which talked about the extremely efficient (for the era) string compression code. So that fits.
Also, someone comments on that post:
I worked at Mirrorsoft at the time when Level 9 had abandoned text adventures entirely and were trying to go on with graphical strategy games via their HUGE system (wHoley Universal Graphical Engine – or something like that!). Sadly, Champion of the Raj and the PC conversion of It Came From the Desert was about all it produced (along with Billy the Kid for Ocean)
Haha, right, I completely forgot about that, even though it’s in the Fact Sheet:
Finally, an animation control system named HUGE (The (w)Holy Universal Game Engine) was added, which was actually a new system on its own, but derived from A-code. HUGE drivers existed for the Amiga and Atari ST, and later the PC, only. It was never used for issued Level 9 games, but e.g. their conversion of It Came from the Desert was programmed using HUGE.
(I can’t remember where this info came from, so it could be incorrect in part, particularly concerning the “never used for Level 9” part.)
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