[Blindapple] Fw: Found a bunch of Public Domain (fwd)

Tony Baechler tony at baechler.net
Thu Nov 18 10:06:18 EST 2004


Hi.  Well, don't get your hopes up here.  Yes, they have quite a few disks, 
and I don't think asimov has all of them.  However, I got the adventure 
set.  Most of it looks like very old Eamons.  They are interesting to me 
for historical value, but they are very old.  The first two disks (going 
only on the included catalog.txt file) have special setups for 48 kb of 
RAM.  I'm assuming that you are very familiar with the inner workings of 
Eamon and the history.  As near as I can tell, before the NEUC came along, 
there were various dealers distributing Eamon versions.  This appears to be 
one of those dealers.  I doubt if they bothered to apply bug fixes etc.  I 
can guarantee that adventures 1 and 2 are before 1984 because there is 
neither a last updated line in the catalog nor the standard blank, 1 sector 
text file.  It looks very much like someone either bought out or borrowed a 
dealer library and transfered everything as-is.  However, I only looked at 
the one zip file so it might be better than it looks.  I went to the end of 
the catalog list and saw the usual Star Wars adventure, etc.  I must have 
seen a ton of Star Trek and Star Wars versions on the other disks I've 
already looked at.

Sorry if I seem harsh or ungreatful.  Actually I think you might have found 
something!  If nothing else, the Eamons are very much of historical 
interest.  There are some other little signs of their age.  The main hall 
is 45 sectors, not the usual 47.  The Wonderful World of Eamon is 14 
sectors, not the usual 17 or 19.  The eamonag.org site might be interested 
since this looks like a very early master.  Hey, I found a lost Eamon on 
asimov that way, so who knows.  If you come across any other posts like 
this, please send them along.  I've got lots of server space so maybe I'll 
grab the Apple disks.  I would not say that there are "a bunch" or 
"billions" though.  There are about 10 sets that I saw, each set being one 
zip file.  The adventure set is only 20 disks.  Actually, I'm greatful to 
you for pointing out that Eamon master, I've been looking for it for awhile.

Here's a little secret about The Beginner's Cave.  An Easter egg, if you 
will.  You will need a way to read the records in eamon.desc, such as the 
dungeon list program on the DDD or utilities disks.  If you read through 
the rooms, you'll see nothing special.  There are 26 rooms as always.  If 
you look at the artifacts and monsters, though, you will see two monsters 
and a few artifacts which are no where in the actual cave.  In other words, 
they have full descriptions but their room is set to 0.  They are not in a 
secret passage.  I can't even count how many times I played that game 
looking for any last secret passages!  I'm probably boring you with my 
rambling.  I don't know if this is in later eamon.desc versions or not, but 
I saw it on my talking master I had for my real Apple. I suspect it is on 
this master too, but maybe not the official EAG master.




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