Like I said, lost, but for a different reason as it turns out.
On a side note, I am in awe of you guys, actually going to those lengths to extract the files. I’ll keep it unplayable file just as a reminder of this.
As I (dimly) recall, TADS 2 came out not that long after TADS 1, so TADS 1 game files were never much in wide circulation. The few TADS 1 games there were, were recompiled with TADS 2, except for the three in this thread. There’s no extant source for a TADS 1 interpreter as far as I am aware.
I assume the interpreter was DOS-based too, or at least there’s a very high chance that it won’t run on modern operating systems, so there’s practically no difference between running the game executables in DOSBox and finding the original interpreter and running it in DOSBox to play the story files. (Except for the Mac game, of course, but I assume there are emulators for it too.)
Best not to assume. I assumed there would have been a Tads 1 interpreter…
Anyway, quick note to the original poster: as you see, whatever the benefits of a standalone executable, please be sure to include the original interpreter-playable file as well to avoid people bashing their heads against it ten years from now.
But in this case the standalone executable is more playable than the interpreter-playable file! The standalones (at least for DOS) are probably playable in an emulator while the interpreters are gone.
The other menu item I put in bundled MaxZip/MaxTADS was “Export Unbundled Interpreter App”. Heh.
In this case, you can probably fake it. The curse.sea app has the game data in the data fork, like Infocom’s Mac apps. So you could use the Rez tools (or cat, I guess) to replace that with any other TADS 1 game file – or maybe it would have to be TADS 1.0.4. (I don’t know how version-compatible TADS 1 was.) Then you could drop that into a MacOS 6 emulator and play the game.
Really, though, the system designer should just save the interpreter source code, rather than relying on leftover game files twenty years on. We all get that now.
We could do that. Then, we could use a tool like RAR which can create an SFX archive with an extension .exe which temporarily extracts the files and will be configured to run MyGame.exe
Quick question(s) which is off topic but picks up on the discussion above. TADS 1 was released in 1987 and TADS 2 in 1992, correct? Ain’t that a bit more than “soon after”? Is there no traces of TADS 1 documentation or games?
There are a few other TADS 1 games, aside from the included Ditch Day Drifter source that was bundled with the TADS interpreters. Alice in Wonderland and High Tech Drifter, the unfinished conclusion of the Ditch Day Drifter Trilogy (before Return To Ditch Day, which technically makes it a quadrilogy now) are two examples of TADS 1 games which survive only in source code form, but can be compiled for TADS 2 by using the -1 switch at compilation time.
