             Coded Infocom(tm) InvisiClues(tm)
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Dear fellow player,

this package contains all of Infocom's published InvisiClues Hint books, typed
in by various people (most notably Paul David Doherty) from the original
booklets. These cover all 28 IF games without built-in online hints.
To enhance the "invisibility" of the hints, to avoid spoiling one's game by
accidentally looking at hints you don't really need, and to add a bit of
inconvenience to hint reading, I have coded all the answers (not the questions
themselves, but note that every hint book contains nonsense questions to
mislead the reader) using a very simple letter substitution cipher. To read the
hints, just mentally replace each letter with the one following it in the
alphabet (e.g. read h as i, s as t) and replace z with a to round things off.
Note that there is no big point in using a more complex scheme, as automatic
decoding is a non-issue here since there are perfectly plain versions of all
the texts available in the if-archive. The whole point is to decode them "by
hand". After a little while, you should be able to read them rather quickly,
but still not accidentally "catch a glimpse" of something you don't want.
Similar to the PERL script in the if-archive invisiclues directory, the coding
was done by computer (This time (shame on me) by a QuickBasic program).
However, several cosmetic improvements were later done by hand, which makes
the results a bit better than those of the PERL script IMHO.

Enough Bragging, enjoy !

Linards Ticmanis, 4.4.1997 (ahem... is this European or American date format ?)

Linards.Ticmanis@post.rwth-aachen.de (subject to change in the near future)


