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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Producing the IF CD
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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 22:10:19 GMT
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In my acclaimed position as Producer, not to mention my
self-ordained capacity as Provider of the Funds, I shall now begin
bah-ing some pooh.

Firstly, note that space is not an issue. A CD-ROM is over 500M of
space.

-----Lords of the Disc:

* Project Manager, Financier, and Grand Pooh-bah: Andrew Plotkin
* Printed Matter Production Team: Eileen Mullin, Neil K. Guy, and
Neil deMause
* CD Formatting and Burn-Ready Copy Compilation Team: John "West"
McKenna
* Advertising and Public Relations Guru: Rob Daviau, aided by a
cast of
thousands
* Legal/Accounting Czar: Joe Mason

(Neil deMause gets a credit for writing the above list, but it's
not worth any money. :-)

Also hordes of testers. We will not discuss whether they're called
"alpha", "beta", or "21st-century" testers.

-----Format:

Options are Mac/IBM hybrid (that's what the LTOI and Masterpieces
discs are), or ISO-9660. I have unfortunately lost the post that
described the limits of ISO-9660.

You should be able to stick the disc into a Mac (System 7 or later)
or IBM box (Windows ?.? or MS-DOS???) and run applications straight
off the CD, no unarchiving or decoding. (These applications may be
installers or game programs; the point is they have to work right
away. Insert disc and double-click icon on a Mac, or the equivalent
under Windows, or set the drive and type a program name under DOS.)

I know this is possible with Mac/IBM hybrids. I am not familiar
with ISO-9660. I know Mac System 7 is *able* to read 9660 discs,
but does it render them seamlessly to the user, resource forks and
Mac file types and correct icons and all? I expect Windows will
have no trouble with it (since it can deal with pre-Win95 discs,
which have 8.3 filenames and no file typing.)

Departing the Mac/IBM juggernaut, I need data. I am very unfamiliar
with everything else.

Unix: My guess would be that IBM boxes running Linux can read both
Mac/IBM hybrids and 9660 discs; is that right? More heavy-metal
Unix boxes will be able to do 9660; I don't know about hybrids; but
the vast majority of such boxes will be on the Net anyway, and can
get everything from ftp.gmd.de.

Older platforms that can run ZIP (C-64, Apple II, etc): I am not
inclined to worry about these, as far as disc format goes. There
aren't many out there, and the ones out there mostly don't have
CD-ROM drives. Those users who *can* transfer files to such a
machine will more likely do it from another, more modern machine,
which we already have covered. Actually, the Amiga is something of
an in-between case. Anyone have an Amiga with a CD-ROM drive?
What's it need?

Damn furriners' machines: What *can* an Acorn read? Please advise.

Machines of the future: Will almost certainly be able to read 9660.
Don't know about hybrids. Anyone out there with a BeBox? Connection
Machine? ZORAC?

Whatever format gets used, remember that we have buttloads of room.
We can easily provide entirely separate trees for Mac, IBM, and
generic Unix, with the same games in each -- but different file
names, of appropriate length and format. Or just lots of
installers.

(Footnote: Why not do this on floppies instead of CD? Answer: I
don't think we can squish things down *that* small. I can fill a
1.4M floppy with just the four largest Inform games plus MaxZip.
Add TADS games and IBM interpreters, and you're up to at least
three floppies. Actually it would be four, two Mac and two IBM --
not all Macs can read IBM discs, and vice versa. Or else have a
"Mac" package and an "IBM" package, available separately. Ignoring
the Amiga, Acorn, and Llama. Too much pain.)

-----Games:

There are generally two categories: those whose authors we can
contact, and the rest. (I don't think the difference between
freeware and shareware is relevant. We will not be including
*pre-registered* shareware, only the freely-distributable part.) It
is unclear whether we can include both categories on the disc. It
may depend on how we deal with money. See the section on "Profit",
below.

  (Inform)
(big list you know as well as me)

  (TADS)
(big list you know as well as me)
Clearly we want freeware versions of the Adventions games. That is,
versions that actually say "Freely distributable." I don't believe
these have been released yet, so we have to find out when they will
be. Damn, I don't have their official announcement post. 

  (other systems)
I am pretty much totally unfamiliar with other systems. Please
advise.

It would be nice if Hugo interpreter ports were ready in time.
Ditto for a Mac AGT port (a modern one, I mean.) Those of you who
can help with such things, you know who you are.

There are a few games that are available as source code, which can
be turned into run-ready binaries on at least IBM and Unix,
possibly Mac. I'm thinking of "Sound of One Hand Clapping", in
particular. But I don't know if we can contact the author for
permission.

Scott Adams' new game would be a good thing to grab, if it's
available in time. That's to be Win95 only. And two of the old SA
games are free now, right?

Activision had a version of Zork free for download, right? We can
ask for permission to include that.

-----Interpreters:

All of them, on every platform down to the Llama 64. I don't think
there are any licensing problems.

-----Compilers:

Inform, TADS if the freeware version is ready in time, HUGO and AGT
to whatever extend they're ported, anything else we can shovel in.

-----Documents:

Tricky. What do we need? Everyone has been saying Acrobat, but I
don't believe any games require anything more than plain text
files.

Would we need to pay a fee to include the Acrobat document
displayer? Remember that it would only work on Mac and Windows; I
don't know about DOS or IBM-box Linux, much less Acorn or whatever.

XYYZY and SPAG? Whizzard has already run into the teeth of the
copyright storm, trying to put SPAG on the Masterpieces CD. I don't
know if this project would have the same problems (it probably
depends on how the profits work -- see "Profits" section.) Whizzard
and Eileen, please comment.

If we do include XYZZY, we should certainly have Acrobat, HTML, and
text versions -- regardless of whether we can include various
Acrobat readers.

-----Packaging:

The initial push will be mail-order, although it certainly would be
cool if it eventually appeared on store shelves. Packaging is
therefore non-critical. No reason to do it badly, of course.

-----Profits:

Oy! This disc will make a profit if it sells well. (As I have said,
selling it at cost would actually reduce sales, in my limited
experience.) The following is my initial proposal, with no actual
values filled in. I float it for comment, not as a final decision.

First, I get paid back for my cash investment. I put in $X, I have
dibs on the first $X. (Not X+percentage. That's covered by the next
paragraph.)

Second, money for those that are putting labor into producing this
disc. This means the Lords of the Disc, described above. (But not
testers. Sorry.) They split Y percent of the profits. (The profits
being money received, minus the $X.) I am not anticipating that
this will be large. It seems to me that the labor involved in this
disc is small compared to the labor involved in producing a single
medium-sized IF game.

Thirdly, there's the rest of the money -- the profits minus the Y
percent.

We can [1] divide up this money among the contributors, according
to some complicated formula which we can argue about (and then I
will decide it by fiat when I'm tired of the argument.)
Contributors means those who have produced things which are on the
disc, but were not produced specifically for the disc. This
definitely includes games and e-zines, but what about interpreters,
compilers, hint files, the maintainers of ftp.gmd.de, ...?

Or we can [2] allow the money to accumulate and use it for further
printings, more advertisements, other projects, etc. One possible
side effect of this: I think we could include games for which the
author is uncontactable. Yes?

-----Name:

This thing needs a name. Sadly, all the good ones are already taken
("Brass Lantern", "Status Line", "XYZZY", etc.) I suggest "The
Round Room."

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
