Software

I have built a large library of PDF books over the years, using the Calibre ebook management tool to manage the collection. For a long time I ran it on my local PC, but sometimes find myself wanting to refer to something when I don’t happen to be sat at my home office desk. So I wanted a way to have an online mirror so I could access my library wherever I was (while securing it from unauthorised access). And this article provides an overview of how I did it for readers who are interested in doing the same.

I was reminded of the delights and challenges of type-in programs from decades past - listings printed in books and magazines for the reader to type in at home - which I suppose could be considered an ultra-low-bandwidth, high-error-rate method of software transmission via the printed page, eyeballs, and fingers - by this tweet about old computer magazines: https://twitter.com/cyb3rops/status/1476122483308875778

I recently discovered Inform 7, a tool for creating text adventure games easily in (semi-)natural English - in this article we see how Inform 7 can be used to implement a small text adventure, and some interesting features of the language along the way. The game is based on MINI, an example adventure in Peter Killworth’s How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (1984). And, after the discussions on how to fit games into small amounts of RAM in my previous article, we shall see how the size of the game varies between BBC BASIC and Inform 7.

I recently picked up my battered copy of Peter Killworth’s How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron (1984) from my bookshelf. This was intended to allow the reader to write text adventure games of the style “GO NORTH”, “TAKE SWORD”, “THORIN SITS DOWN AND STARTS SINGING ABOUT GOLD” - a genre nowadays generally referred to nowadays as interactive fiction. But looking at it now reminded me of the challenges of writing these adventures then, and prompted me to explore how these have changed in the intervening decades (especially with increasingly sophisticated authoring tools) - and how these challenges relate to the concepts of accidental and essential complexity in system design.