I’m playing So Far and it turns out it’s pretty hard (I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone).
The IFDB page has links to three different walkthroughs, but I don’t really want to use a walkthrough. I think I’m going to need some hints, though. The only hints linked there are in “THL” format which apparently refers to a hint viewer/editor tool by Stefan Meier called “The Hint Library” for Windows 95. THL is on the IF Archive, but it won’t run (or at least its installer won’t) on my Windows 11 laptop. The THL files themselves seem to be in a binary format of some kind, so I can’t trivially extract the text.
Anyone know if there either is a newer version of this tool, a way to run it on my current computer, or any information about the THL file format so I can write something to view it myself?
I don’t remember if the THL hints are the same ones that I wrote or not, but the ones I wrote are available as UHS hints, which hopefully should get you through any rough spots:
Oh, hey, I found a HTML version of the hints on my computer. I stuck it on Google Drive:
where it of course doesn’t actually interpret the HTML, so everything is visible. If you download it and view it in a browser, the hints should be properly white-on-white (highlight to view). The UHS version is more properly functional to pace the hints better, though, so that’s the version I’d use if it works for you.
OMG, I didn’t know that is is still available in the archive. That was sooo long ago. I guess, there is nothing left of this, perhaps on very old backups. But honestly, I do not think it is worth any efforts. It was a Delphi application which was similar to the UHS system, with the main difference being that with THL you can create files by yourself as well (IIRC this was not possible at the time with UHS, but I am not sure). If you really want to mess around I can try to find the sources in my backups. It might be possible to open it with Lazarus, but I don’t know.
Some of these hints were definitely based on hints from other fellows and ported over to THL (either by me with permission or by the original authors, cannot remember, sorry). That certainly applied to the So far hints and the Star Trek hints. I would assume that the Infocom hints resemble the Invisiclue hints, but this is lost in my memories as well…
Give me a shout when you want to look at it and I do my best to track down the sources in my backups.
I did indeed find our old message exchange about the THL So far file (March 1997 - what a long time ago) in my mail backlog. You took the burden yourself with creating the file (well, it seems it wasn’t so straight forward - as you called it „THL seems good for creating new files, not so much for editing existing files )
Very nice travelling back in time. Around 2002 I took an image of my complete machine running Windows XP. Even after converting the VM several times, it still works. Unfortunately Delphi and my Delphi sources are not on the machine anymore, but I got some hints where to find them.
I found all the old stuff on one of my old backups. It had both the sources for THL 1.0, THL 1.1 and the sources of the thl files in a readable text format. It contains the executables without the installers as well. Will push everything to a git repo, for the unlikely cause that it is of any use.
Out of interest, I tried to build with with the recent Delphi CE, which succeeded after some minor fixes. Will push this as well, in anyone wants to mess round with it. An immediate conversion to Lazarus did not work because of conflicts with some components, but if someone is really interested, this should be possible as well, to free it from a commercial build environment.
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