Hitchhikers guide

nmcg

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Anyone know when the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy text adventure is due to be released in a OS X native version?

Is anyone working on this at all anymore?

Thanks,
Neil
 
I kind of doubt that Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be coming to OS X anytime soon, at least legally. Unlike most Infocom games that you might actually see for sale really cheaply, that one was actually bought by Douglas Adams, and despite his very unfortunate death, I doubt anyone in his family is going to give up a piece of the Hitch Hiker's Guide franchise. (You can play it online for free though, at http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html)

On another note, I have about 16 Mac versions of Infocom games, and have been trying to figure out how to convert them into Java applets, which seems to be what to do with them. However, none of the descriptions on how to do this say how to do it for Macs, where the data appears to have been compiled into the game itself. Anyone have any ideas? I would love to play Planetfall again.

-Bruce Adcock
 
It seems there is a Z-Interpreter (the program that reads and plays old Infocom games) ready for Mac OS X! I did a little poking around week before last on this very subject and found that JZip (the program in question) had already been ported to Darwin. The following info assumes you're willing to spend a little time in Terminal, but if you aren't you proabably aren't willing to play text-based games anyway. :)

Check this resource out for info on where to download the interpreter (they call it a "UNIX Zork engine") and how to get it working:
<blockquote>http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20010407020830755</blockquote>
And if you do a little URL mining, you can find the source code for this great text game available from the address mentioned above:
<blockquote>http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.z5</blockquote>
 
Text based games ???
I have a whole lot of them but I cant get into them... perhaps I am spoild with all teh graphical games I grew up with ;)
 
Incidentally, for anyone who still has those old Mac versions of Infocom games, you _can_ use something like jzip to play them. It was pretty obvious, but I had never bothered to look until this morning... Basically, it turns out that the actual data file was kept in, strangely enough, the data fork. And since jzip doesn't recognize anything but, you can simply go to the directory containing the game and type, for example,

%jzip SPELLBREAKER

Since I don't really trust jzip to not modify the game (I doubt it will, but if it did, and for some bizarre, inexplicable reason I wanted to play the game in OS 9, where would I be?) you can just type (again, for example)

%cp PLANETFALL planetfall.z5

and from then on

%jzip planetfall.z5

This will just keep the data fork part of the program, since cp isn't resource fork aware.

-Bruce Adcock
 
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