All spanish games from the old CAAD website has been preserved at ifarchive

General IF Community Resources
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An important stage in the process of preserving the games of the old Spanish Interactive Fiction community has been completed. All the production of the neoclassical era is now accessible at IF Archive.

The entire collection of games from the old CAAD server is now hosted at ifarchive.org in their respective folders…

For example, if you wanted to find all the Spanish Spectrum emulator games there, you would have to go to the directory:

if-archive/games/spectrum/spanish

All this has been made possible by the tireless work of the following archivists:

David Kinder, Andrew Plotkin, JTN, and co. of the IFTF who have been kind enough to lend the space and archive the games - thank you very much!

Thanks to deesix and the other admins of the former CAAD for archiving the bulk of the material and data in the Internet Archive.

Comely has gone through all the game files one by one, looking for duplicates and compiling everything in a structured file.

Ruber Eaglenest (that’s me!) for liaising with the IFTF and some little organizational part of it.

Finally, just a reminder that both IF Archive, as well as the new CAAD are free to use community services to preserve your Interactive Fiction games.

All this information and more links about the preservation of community games can be found in the following post:

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Great news, thanks to all who worked to realize that monumental task.

Two questions:

  1. Can you deliberate on neoclassical era a bit more?
  1. Can you or any other native speakers suggest games from that archive for a person who wants to learn Spanish?
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The volunteers are still in the process of checking over the files, making sure they’re in the right directory, and adding descriptions.

Some of these files may be moved around over the next few days.

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I like to use it half-joking all the time, to express the time frame of the community since 1995 till 2008-2012 more or less. It was coined by Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian:

https://www.filfre.net/2021/09/the-neo-classical-interactive-fiction-of-1995/

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Specifically, if you see a file with “(from caad.es archive, under review)” in its description (currently that’s most of them), it’s not been looked at yet, and may be moved/renamed/deduplicated.

(Also note that the files have gone in the archive with their original timestamps, so most of them won’t show up on the various ‘recent files’ lists.)

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Fantastic news.

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when i asked this, this was suggested:

i have yet to play it but it’s on my list

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Thanks for the El libro que se aburría suggestion, it’s IFDB page also points to some nice polls of other games suitable for language learning.

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Couple of mysteries in the new files, if anyone reading here can help.
(Sorry this is en inglés, I know I’d be more likely to reach the right people in Spanish, but I have none.)

Mainly I’m after enough information to establish authorship and chronology, for filing purposes.

Reflejos.zip

This file came with no authorship or title information. (Originally from descargas/Otros/Otros/reflejos.rar.)
It’s a hypertext about a commercial telepath (CN: violence/murder), consisting of a bunch of linked HTML files, timestamped Sep 16, 2004.

One clue however is <meta name="Generator" content="Hipercuentos Bancaja 1.5">.
This led me to the Concurso Hipercuentos Bancaja (via this 2003 press article), a hypertext competition run at least in 2003, and I think again in 2004 (although the site text was inconsistent about that until it fell off the web in 2006 or so).
That did indeed come with a hypertext generator tool. So it seems clear that Reflejos.zip is an entry, or planned entry, into this competition (probably the 2004 event). However, the competition pages only mention the winners of the first and second events, not other entrants (and not this one). I haven’t come across any other files from caad.es in this format.

I didn’t find any metadata about this work, or competition, on a trawl through the Wayback Machine’s copies of www.caad.es and WikiCAAD. (I guess any hypertext/literary community was probably separate back then?)
Does anyone remember/know anything about it? Particularly, who the author was?

El Jabato for MSX

An MSX expert might be able to help with this; I don’t know the MSX myself.

The IF Archive already had a copy of El Jabato for MSX, games/msx/spanish/Jabato.zip. I can get that one to run fine on WebMSX (run "jabato.bas" or run "fideo.bas"; also useful to know that files lists disc contents).

Another copy arrived from caad.es (currently in unprocessed/jabato.zip). It’s clearly the same work, but also not trivially the same at any level; the structure of the disc image is different, as are contents of most but not all individual files. (Also different timestamps – 1992 vs 2000 – but I don’t trust the latter to be relevant.)
And I can’t get this new one to run in WebMSX at all; run "jabato1.bas" or run "jabato2.bas" just seems to cause a reset.

But maybe programs could be critically dependent on the model of MSX, or OS version, or some other detail that I don’t know about? Not uncommon in the 8-bit era. Or maybe there’s some other detail I’m missing.

I’d mainly like to know if it’s clearly an earlier or later version than the one we have. It would also be reassuring to know it can be made to work.
Otherwise I guess we just file it alongside the existing one as “another copy ??? idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

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It might be Jabato, published by Aventuras AD in 1989 for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, C64, MSX, PC and ZX Spectrum. It is based on the comics of El Jabato by Victor Mora. CASA has a more detailed summary, including screen grabs for a few systems, but not the MSX. (I can get you those, if you want them, but we need to confirm that it’s the same game first.) See https://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C2169./Jabato.html.

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I just confirmed that it is the same game as listed on CASA. Here’s a screen grab of the credits:

jabato-credits

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I had no doubt that both the files I mentioned were this game (although CASA’s pointer to generation-msx.nl might possibly provide additional clues). My question was about the difference between the two files, and how to get the second one I mentioned working.

When you say “it”, do you mean the version I already got working, or the one that I didn’t?
If the latter, how did you get as far as a credits screen?

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Type LOAD “jabato1.bas” instead of RUN, so the basic loader won’t execute.
LIST It and remové the first line with the weird POKE.
RUN It now. It will work.
Just don’t ask me why!!! :sweat_smile:

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It looks like I downloaded the version that was working, which is different to the version I had. More on this in a moment.

I’ve just tried the other version from unprocessed and can confirm that running either of the BASIC programs appears to reboot the computer, but deleting line 1, as suggested by @rockersuke fixes that problem.

For the version that’s working, JABATO.BAS is the loader for part 1. This in turn loads JABATO.001 to JABATO.006, which are binary files. FIDEO.BAS is the loader for part 2. This in turn loads FIDEO.001 to FIDEO.006, which are also binary files.

For the version that’s not working, after deleting line 1 in the two BASIC files, JABATO1.BAS is the loader for part 1. This loads JABATO.BIN, JABATO4.BIN to JABATO7.BIN and SLOTS.BIN. JABATO2.BAS is the loader for part 2. This loads JABATO2.BIN, JABATO24.BIN to JABATO27.BIN and SLOTS2.BIN.

You could extract the individual files from each disk and do a file-by-file comparison between the two versions to see if there’s any differences. My gut feeling is to go for the one that currently works.

I suspect that both of these are hacked versions. The original disk was different to both of these. You could not read the files, as it had some sort of custom format presumably for copy protection. This autoran and loaded a menu that allowed you to select part 1 or part 2. Neither of the IF Archive disks have this.

If you want to test part 2, the password is “INEXES LOXIKO”. This is not case sensitive. I can’t play the game, as I do not speak Spanish, but there are maps and a solution on CASA if anyone wants to test it.

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That did appear to avoid the reset! (With the default machine configuration of WebMSX, and only going as far as the first prompt, so I don’t know if I’d run into more subtle trouble later.)

Searching further, I find that this POKE-1,170 is a common enough non-portable bodge to have a forum thread, which explains (to some extent) what it does, and suggests a more-portable replacement (POKE-1,(15-PEEK(-1)\16)*17). Using that also appears to work.

That makes sense. So whoever cracked the troublesome one just used what worked on their machine, or something like that.

I did that, but I read/reported the results wrongly. I’ve now re-done it, and in fact there is no file in one disc image that has identical contents to any file on the other disc image. Doesn’t prove they’re not somehow cracks of the same ultimate source, but not trivial to prove either way.

So I think we should keep them both around, in case the differences are important for future archaeologists. I’ll come up with some sort of arbitrary naming and notes.

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On the other mystery (Reflejos.zip): since I was filing SPAC issues, I skimmed through the ones around 2003/4, but didn’t find any mention of the Concurso Hipercuentos Bancaja.

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I also did that! :slight_smile: No luck!
Interestingly, I had this reflejos html stuff downloaded in my “aventuras españolas” folder from a ton of years ago, which means it was publicly announced somewhere (or I wouldn’t have been aware of it at all).
So I searched through the wayback machine into the news section of caad.mine.nu, which was the domain caad was using in 2004.
Again, no luck!
The only other place where I could have heard about it was the yahoogroups mail-list caad-people were using at that time (the web forum was about to be born at those very same months) but I don’t even know if mail-lists can be preserved at all or, if that was the case, someone did! :smile:

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Indeed the lists were preserved! I’ve just been told at textualiza’s discord! :smiley:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230203225751/http://www.caad.es/listas/

There are mentions of this 2nd Bancaja’s comp around may 2004 which caused a heated discussion about what “hipertexto” actually means :smile:, and author Santiago Eximeno mentioned he “might be interested” in joining the comp.

But… that’s it!

No more talk about it at all (or I just couldn’t find, there are a ton of messages!). Nothing around september 2004 (the date the files are stamped with) and no mention of any “reflejos” .

I might have missed something, so I’ll keep seraching anyway!

–

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If it is horror, probably is by Santiago.

But no, it is not listed in his ludography.

The thing is, that phrase “Concurso Hipercuentos Bancaja” resonates with me a lot, but of course I’m not going to remember who did that.

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(Since this thread about other languages just woke up again, I note in passing that this competition had categories for works en valenciano, and at least three such works were produced.)