I’ve had a bootdisk itch lately, and this is one of the resulting projects: a set of three bootable floppies that allow you to play 44 classic IF games from a slick menu-driven interface. “Why?” Why not? If you have an x86 computer with a floppy drive, it’s an enjoyably tactile and nostalgic way to play IF.
Notable 70s - ADVENT
- Hunt the Wumpus
- Zork (MIT version)
Notable 80s - Scott Adams (14 games)
Notable 90s - A Change in the Weather
- Christminster
- Curses!
- Delusions
- Detective (MST3K)
- Meteor, Stone
- So Far
Classic Modern:
Wordplay - Ad Verbum
Sci-Fi - All Things Devours
Conversation - Galatea
Unusual - The Gostak
Cave Crawl - Hunter, In Darkness
Humor/Intro - Lost Pig
Romance - Masquerade
Eastern - The Moonlit Tower
Story - Photopia
Puzzler - Savoir-Faire
Thriller - Spider and Web
More Modern:
Subversion - 9:05
Detective - An Act of Murder
Children’s - A Bear’s Night Out
Fairy Tale - Bronze
Unusual - For A Change
Culinary - Gourmet
Puzzler - The Mulldoon Legacy
Sci-Fi - The Orion Agenda
Conversation - Pytho’s Mask[/code][/spoiler]
This is a neat collection of games, nicely packaged and presented. Thanks @prevtenet!
You can run this under Dosbox too. It might defeat the tactile aspect, but the nostalgia remains. This is a prolix process, hence the spoiler block :mrgreen: Details for the adventurous follow…
[spoiler]* Install Dosbox from your package manager (Linux) or from dosbox.com (Windows)
Extract if_floppies.zip somewhere memorable
Run dosbox, you are presented with the black box, ready for command input. This mounts the path to the dosbox c-drive:
MOUNT C [MEMORABLE PATH]
Now you can boot the first floppy image:
BOOT C:\IFCLAS~1.IMG
notes
The filename IFCLAS~1.IMG is shortened because dos has a 8.3 file name length limit.
You can press TAB to auto-complete partially entered file names, and cycle between similar file names. Thus you can enter “BOOT C:\IF[TAB]” to quickly access floppies 1,2 or 3.
advanced users
You can create an empty floppy image and swap it out with the game floppy to SAVE and RESTORE
Create a blank floppy image “saves.img” with dd in Linux. Be sure to create this in the same directory as the game images.
For windows users, best you look online for a tool to make you a floppy image.
dd if=/dev/zero of=saves.img bs=512 count=2880
when booting the floppy image, pass saves.img as a second parameter:
BOOT C:\IFCLAS~1.IMG C:\SAVES.IMG
You can press CTRL-F4 in dosbox to swap between the game disk and save disk.[/spoiler]