Online IF collection - new site

In part, I expect. Founder-effect is pretty strong. (I started out in TADS 2 because Worlds Apart was the first IF game to alert me to the existence of the IF community.) I think it’s also because a bunch of standard AIF libraries were written for TADS 2.

Oh yeah, almost certainly. The same names keep popping up.

I didn’t know about the libraries - that’d help, yes! Though I expect other systems got libraries as well.

Funny thing is, it’s not just that there’s a lot of AIF TADS… it’s the ratio between AIF and NON-AIF in TADS. I haven’t done some serious counting, although if anyone were in a position to that it’d be me, but it seems to me - highly subjective! - that from the total percentage of TADS games, AIF occupies a larger percentage than I thought, and probably larger than others (again: subjective. There’s LOADS of AIF for ADRIFT yet, and those still need sorting. But there seem to be MORE ADRIFT games than TADS games, too. Because it’s always been easier to make games in ADRIFT than TADS)

I guess that, apart from what I’ve said, as Inform started growing into respectability and then awesomeness some people started gravitating to it; fast-foward a decade or so and there are barely TADS games made. The more Inform games are made, the more that ratio diminishes.

Anyway, I’m not really reading much of anything into it, just having fun with some observations and extrapolating wildly from a mostly uninformed viewpoint. There, that’s the disclaimer out of the way.

See this post of Nitku’s.
TADS never made up a huge slice of the pie; its best ever slice of published games was 27%, in 1999. The latter-day shrinking of TADS might be related to the rise of I7, but TADS was already shrinking as a total share of games before I7 came out. (Or rather, TADS 3’s share was holding more or less steady while TADS 2 steadily shrank.)

I think the data’s fuzzy enough - after all, it might take a few years between being inspired by a game made in a given platform and releasing a game in that platform yourself - that it’s hard to point to any one cause of the shrinking of TADS. Personally, as someone who switched from TADS 2 to Inform 7, the switch was as much about TADS 3 as it was about Inform; I’m tempted to generalise that experience, but I’m not confident that the stats support it.

Heads up - I’m now in the process of collecting BBC Micro adventure games.

I’m starting from the archive, then scouring the web. IFDB has a BBC and BBC Micro tag, so that helps.

If anyone has any ideas on other places to look, I’m all ears and would be thankful.

The reason for this is, I always thought that all games worth playing on the BBC also existed on other systems. Well, “Castle of Riddles” is a Phoenix game, and is therefore worth at least preserving, and it only seems to exist on the BBC Micro. So - the BBC micro is in.

You could try searching the BBC/Electron games at CASA. 436 BBC games are listed there, but I have no idea how many of them are only available on the BBC.

That looks like an awesome resource, thank you! But, is it just me doing something wrong or is it that for most of the entries there isn’t an actual game, only a screenshot and assorted information?

(BTW, exclusivity isn’t a problem. If a Spectrum/Commodore/DOS version of a game is significantly different from another - like the huge difference in graphics quality from Commodore to DOS in the Telarium games - I tend to keep both copies. If they’re the same, I often keep the one that I find plays best to my sensibilities. Not everyone will agree on my choice - not everyone will have the same emulators! - but this collection always had that disclaimer: it’s my collection, so it’s inevitably my sensibilities. Which tend to be broad, so hey)

EDIT - Nevermind, I think I found a place where I can look for the games using CASA as an index. Brilliant! Thank you so much!

This has come up in a PM, but it’s relevant enough that I tell people -

If anyone does NOT want their games included, specifically, be sure to let me know. This is worth repeating. The default is, you publish it, it goes in; but if you specifically do not want this to happen - and to date one author has requested, specifically, that his games are not included - let me know and I’ll remove them off the online collection.

I’ll still have the game in my offline collection, though, so if someone - including the author - wishes to find the game at a later date, FWIW, I may probably have it.

Are you looking for a database of games or for downloads? CASA seems to be really good source to find out about games for the platform.

BBC Tags on IFDB show basically only Acornsoft games with maybe one or two other games. MobyGames is surprisingly pretty bad place for interactive fiction games.

For downloads. Have you tried Acorn BBC TOSEC on archive.org?

CASA is a wonderful database, but I was looking for games.

I’ve since amassed a reasonable amount of games for the BBC Micro, and I’ve done a bit of searching, and am satisfied with what I already have. I do pay special attention, of course - every time a game is mentioned that I may not have, or that a site is mentioned which turns out to have games I was missing, I’ll spring into action. As for now, I think I’ve got a reasonable amount.

I am not quite the sort of die-hard collector that will explore every nook and cranny… mostly because, well, the design standards of those times were… different. I do have fun with some games, and am glad to have found them, but there’s a limit to the energy I wish to expend in locating them.

Having said that, if I get a whiff of something I don’t already have, I’ll try to track it down! I’m no longer looking for generalities and whole catalogs - now I’m in the lookout for actual games, as they appear.

Thanks for the tips!

Quick heads-up: there’s a file in the IFArchive which is beebgames, or some such. It provides you with .INF files to various BBC Micro games.

To anyone interested, it turns out that those files aren’t easy to read. They’re Not Nice. They’re downright naughty.

I found a python script to convert them to .UEF files which are easier for emulators (read: BeebEm) to deal with, and that’s the format they’ll be going into my collection.

So, hey, if you’re ever trying to play one of those games and you’re wording “aw shucks, I wish there were an easier way to play this!”, take a looksie, I may have already converted it.

If I haven’t, it’s easy enough for me to convert, and you’ll probably find it’s also easy enough for you to convert yourself if you want to. Anyway, just letting y’all know.

My collection is offline.

I would like to announce that someone has decided to inform MEGA that my collection was infringing copyright. MEGA has promptly removed the whole lot.

Just so y’all know. I’ll keep my stuff to myself from now on. The amount of resistance I got on this, and now this aggravation, it really isn’t worth it. It was my way of giving something back to the community. I made sure to remove games whose authors asked me to (only one, to date). If some people are really that concerned, well. I’ve better things to do with my time.

Thanks for the support - those of you who did support it and found it useful. I think there’s more of you than there were of the other people, but you know, the other people were loudest.

Wow, that definitely sucks.
Sorry, man. And thanks for all the time invested.

That’s a shame to hear. MEGA doesn’t allow any way to contest a takedown request? (Or rather, they don’t allow any relatively clean and painless way to contest?) I did appreciate the collection while it was up.

Their e-mail didn’t mention any, but I’m not really willing to contest. Strictly speaking - and I mean really strictly, in the cold-letter-of-the-law - whoever put the request was correct, as I did not track down every single author for permission and neither did I only include games which specifically said in their documentation could be freely distributed, and then there’s of course the grey area (which is closer to black than it is to gray, I guess) of the Commodore games, the Spectrum games, the Amiga games… It’d be a losing battle in which I have very little invested. There are fights to be fought, and this just isn’t one.

Mostly I’m sad that this is the best solution that someone found. My e-mail was in the README, I have taken down games whose authors asked me to (in one particular case told me to), and I didn’t really figure it’d end like this.

MEGA, after the disaster of Megauploads, will of course not really tolerate this sort of stuff. I’m actually quite pleased with their service, and can recommend it. My collection was very slow, sure, but then, it was unusually large. BTW, they didn’t actually delete the content outright; they somehow made it so that other people wouldn’t be able to access it.

Sorry to hear about that, Peter. It was a valuable service.

Oof, that sucks. Thanks for doing it though, it was useful!

I’ve never been a big fan of container downloads. I think a valuable service could be added to ifdb or the archive where you could select a bunch of files and when you download them, they get zipped at that time and once downloaded, the zip file is deleted. And then if this service had some sort of login, you could remind people of the things they’ve already downloaded.

But large container downloads are a magnet for what happened here. Someone is just going to get pissy about it and poof, it’s gone. A lot of effort gets wasted.

Let me just clarify something: the online collection is gone, my offline collection is not, and I’m still collecting.

If anyone is looking for anything, I’m still here for the asking. :slight_smile:

EDIT - For the interested, I did reply to MEGA’s e-mail asking for more information and they have kindly supplied me with all the information - and all the caveats - regarding a counter notice. It was a nice e-mail, I liked it. Again, I recommend MEGA; I understand the MegaUpload fiasco left a lot of people wary, so maybe this is partly why it’s cleaned up its act, but it does look quite clean.

Any idea who ratted you out? Was it someone here?

Sorry to hear about the closure of your public interactive fiction collection, Peter. If you do know the license status of some free games, could you add them to the If Archive?

What about a non-centralised distribution like a bittorrent tracker?