I’ve been adapting some game books into z-machine story files for the past 2 months, mostly from the Virtual Reality Adventure book series. They were part of efforts to study the ZIL language and to provide a proof of concept that other types of interactive fiction can be done in it.
The last one is part of the Time Machine book series of Choose Your Own Adventures.
Although, I’ve gone through the code lots of times (links in their individual IFDB pages), it is still possible that I still missed some bugs may, so any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks and I hope you fine folks enjoy these
Additional Notes:
Save and Restore functionality is available. Press using S or R keys to save or restore your game during action selection.
PS.
I’ve gotten permission form Dave Morris to release the Virtual Reality Adventures. If they decide to go commercial, these will be withdrawn. I am still in the process of reaching out to Jim Gasperini.
We’ve discussed packaging up the maps and art as a feelies PDF, I still endorse that plan.
And I’d also love to see an attempt to bash the awesomely terrible Virtual Reality Adventure logo into ASCII (well, ZSCII but you get my point) and optionally display it at the start of the game, but that is a perverse wish at best.
In Necklace of Skulls, while in the merchant interface (093), I can get some helper screens like C and I, but not ?/H. (Hitting one of those keys seems to just be treated like a bad keypress and brings up the “you can buy anything you have money for” list again.)
Documented ‘I’ (inventory) command key in-game and in README
Pressing keys that are not among the available options should no longer trigger a response, except for situations where H (help), I (inventory), C (character) are applicable
@jcompton I really appreciate you taking the time to test these and for the numerous suggestions
On a related note, Dave Morris and Steve Foster recently made available the unpublished Quilled ZX Spectrum text adventure version of Dave’s White Dwarf magazine gamebook The Castle of Lost Souls. The articles were later used as a basis for the Golden Dragon gamebook.
It’s taken a long time to release this. Right about the time I started working on this in 2021, I caught COVID. I was hospitalized for eight days and was unconscious for the first two. Unfortunately, my twin brother also caught the virus but he did not survive. Dealing with the tragedy has been extremely difficult even after three years. The book’s subjects, being a thinly veiled reference to a group of people that’s on the news nowadays, also made me hesitate even now.
I do not wish to cause anyone undue stress. For myself, working on this and bringing it to completion was a way of coping with my great loss.
Thanks for the support and appreciation of my past work. I hope all of you are doing well, fine folks.
