[Blindapple] Eamon

[Tony Baechler]

Jayson and all,

Don't be so sure that eamonag.org has everything.  Yes, it is the complete, 
official Eamon site.  However, I found a lost Eamon on the Apple2 Asimov ftp 
site which no one had heard of before, including the Eamon maintainers.  I 
know of several other lost Eamons as well in various states of completeness 
and playability.  It's possible that Tom or someone else out there has an 
old Eamon on disk which is not in general circulation and/or which is lost. 
  By lost, I mean any Eamon not widely available on eamonag.org, but I'm 
also referring to old versions which have fallen out of favor for various 
reasons, such as bugs.  A good example of a set of lost Eamons which I would 
really like to get are the tournament versions.  I had both the Tournament 
Main Hall and the original, tournament version of Eamon #79 at one time, but 
the disk went bad and I don't have them anymore.  John Nelson and the former 
Eamon maintainers dropped the tournament version by 1984, thus making it 
very hard to find, but I know it's out there because I've played through it.

Also, I think there might be an old, lost Beginner's Cave out there.  On my 
original Apple disk of the master, the eamon.desc has several monsters not 
actually used anywhere that don't show up in the actual game when playing 
through it.  I'm left wondering why they were left in and if there was more 
in the early versions which got dropped later for some reason.  In 
conclusion, I respectfully ask you to please not make assumptions that there 
is no need to image your old Eamon disks.  Perhaps I just got lucky, but I 
know I had quite a number of old versions now no longer available.  Granted, 
some did have serious bugs, but still, they're valuable history if nothing 
else.  I'm very disappointed that so many of my disks went bad to the point 
that my drives couldn't read them, but I was using original Apple drives 
from when the II Plus came out.  Perhaps they could be recovered with better 
equipment, but I doubt it and it would be very difficult to get at them.

Regarding the Infocom games, Jayson is right.  Not only are they still very 
much under copyright, but the Apple disks are easily available with 
different versions of the games.  I would agree that getting the data files 
and a modern interpreter would be the better option, at least for 
accessibility.  However, even at that, there are different versions of the 
games out there with different bugs and features.  If you can find an old 
copy of the Masterpieces CD, you get almost all of the Infocom games at once 
except Shogun and Hitchhiker's Guide, but both are easily found on the 
Asimov site if it's still around.  I have everything, including the missing 
ones.  I'll give them to you if you can somehow prove that you have legal 
copies.  Activision is still around and I don't want to be sued.

On 2/25/2013 7:54 PM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> As for Eamon, I have some very good news for you. Unless you have disks with
> characters you've worked hard to develop or you've designed your own Eamons
> or utilities, you probably don't need to worry about imaging them. A
> complete set of Eamons for DOS 3.3, as well as sixty or so for ProDos, is
> available from www.eamonag.org. I downloaded a CD they produced with the
> disk images and a ton of other stuff. If you want this, let me know and we
> can work something out.
>
> As for Infocom games, there's probably little need to image them either. The
> games themselves are available from various "warez" sites I'm sure, and I
> also have them. Unless you have some particular reason to play them on an
> Apple, you'd probably have a better experience playing them on a modern
> computer using a modern Z-machine interpreter.
> Jayson