Mirror Of Khoronz was originally written for the BBC in 1987 as a sequel to Derek’s excellent Gateway To Karos which was published by Acornsoft. Sadly the BBC’s software arm were no longer interested in publishing IF by then so the game became MIA.
With added memory available via the RISC OS he was encouraged to rewrite and restructure Mirror, expanding and improving it to well over 300 locations.
I have recently play tested this new expanded 222K version and the result is an even bigger, cleaned up RISC version which Derek has kindly sent me and would like me to upload.
An interesting logistical feature is that FORWARD, BACK, LEFT and RIGHT work indoors and the standard compass rose directions al fresco.
Definitely fun to play but have your pen and paper / Trizbort close to hand.
[EDIT: What I’m trying to say is that although you claim the game “became MIA”, it clearly wasn’t MIA (missing in action) for very long, because it had already been published on a BBC PD disc by 1993.]
The original BBC Micro version is available to download or play online:
The original unpublished version is of course considerably smaller given the memory constraints of the Beeb. Acornsoft allowed it to be released into the public domain.
The author tells me that he is hoping to release a RISC version of Gateway To Karos as well as a third part of the trilogy tentatively named The Far Islands.
In case anyone else is struggling to run the RISC OS version of Mirror, I thought I’d mention that I eventually managed to get it working on macOS Mojave in RPCEmu after installing !Sparkplug and Universal Boot. (No, I don’t know what any of that really means either!)
Thanks for that. I think there is also an easy start bundle for Windows and other platforms which includes !Sparkplug and everything else you need here.
Let me know how you get on with it. I found it quite difficult in places (the bandits are a real handful) but I did get a great sense of world immersion.
Just a new heads up that Derek has tweaked the latest version slightly and squashed a couple more lingering bugs involving a candle and a narration by one of the NPCs.
The definitive version is now on his web site (765kb in size).
Sorry for the zombified topic, but the author’s website has the RISC OS version of Gateway to Karos posted, dated 09-Aug-2023 (v2.54). Website is the one posted by @Canalboy above.