🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

You climb into the bed. It is soft and comfortable. After a few moments, a previously unseen panel opens, and a diagnostic robot comes wheeling out. It is very rusty and sways unsteadily, bumping into several pieces of infirmary equipment as it crosses the room. As the robot straps you to the bed, you notice some smoke curling from its cracks. Beeping happily, the robot injects you with all 347 serums and medicines it carries. The last thing you notice before you pass out is the robot preparing to saw your legs off.

-- Planetfall

Factoid of the day

One of the main characters in the Infocomic ZorkQuest: Assault on Egreth Castle is named Gurthark, an apparent reference to the spider-like alien creature from Starcross: "The spider tells you his name is 'Gurthark-tun-Besnap,' (or something more-or-less that)."

*An epic adventure... underground.*
Sep 1993

Analog Computing, #39

~1 minute read

Feb 1986

READER COMMENT

Don't Panak

Brian Moriarty and Analog Computing editors

I'd like to correct an error that appeared in Steve Panak's January column (issue 38).

We are most certainly not abandoning our 8-bit Atari fans! Except for Steve Meretsky's A Mind Forever Voyaging, every Infocom game published to date is available for all Atari 400, 800, XL and XE computers with at least 48K of RAM. This includes our latest title, Spellbreaker, as well as our new February release, Ballyhoo.

A Mind Forever Voyaging is the first in our Interactive Fiction Plus™ series. "Plus" games require an 80-column display, 300K of disk space and 128K of RAM (preferably more). Regrettably, these specifications exclude most Atari, Commodore and Tandy machines, and all but the largest Apples.

Fear not, loyal InfoFans! Only a limited number of our future games will use the "Plus" system. Most titles we're working on are "Classic" games, and will run fine on 8-bit Ataris. Relax! Infocom will publish 8-bit games as long as you continue to buy them.

  Brian Moriarty
  Infocom, Inc.
  Cambridge, MA

Thank you for bringing this information to our attention, Brian. Steve Panak realized (too late) that his statement was indeed inaccurate, as he mentions in his column next month.

Brian also tells us that the 520ST is one of the few machines in which the entire A Mind Forever Voyaging runs in RAM with no disk access necessary.

-Ed.

This article appeared in
Analog Computing
Feb 1986

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.