Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!uunet!mcsun!sunic!news.lth.se!news.lu.se!magnus
From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Re: Infocom text dumper found!
Message-ID: <1993Apr14.095026.10133@nomina.lu.se>
Sender: news@nomina.lu.se (USENET News System)
Nntp-Posting-Host: dirac.thep.lu.se
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
References: <93103.020738MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 09:50:26 GMT
Lines: 41

In article <93103.020738MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu> Mark 'Mark' Sachs <MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>A while back, someone asked here about a program that would dump all
>the text from an Infocom game.
>
>Well, guess what I found!
>
>In the Amiga Fred Fish public domain library, on disk 834, you'll find
>InfoTools, a collection of utilities for messing with Infocom games.
>They include

[...]

>...an Infocom DISASSEMBLER. Feed it the Story.Data file from any Infocom
>game, and it spews out the source code! See what ZIL really looks like!

Well, not really. What the disassembler outputs is _not_ the actual ZIL
code, but the Z code (the low-level language produced by the ZIL
compiler and interpreted by ZIP on the respective platforms).

As far as I know, ZIP was a Lisp-like high-level language, but the
output of the disassembler looks like assembly code. Still, it's very
interesting, of course...

>This Fish disk is, of course, available on all the official fish archive
>sites (see some of the comp.sys.amiga FAQs for info) and also on the aminet
>mirrors; I just found it on oes.orst.edu, pub/aminet/fish/ff834/infotools.lzh.
>I can upload it to the if-archive site if there's a pressing demand to.

I donwloaded it from oes.orst.edu and the C sources compiled and ran just fine
on a Unix system. However, this is an Amiga port of a Unix (or possibly
MS-DOS) program, and I *think* I've seen the original version
somewhere else. Unfortunately, I couldn't connect to ftp.gmd.de, so I
couldn't check if it was there already.

              Magnus Olsson                | \e+      /_
    Department of Theoretical Physics      |  \  Z   / q
        University of Lund, Sweden         |   >----<           
 magnus@thep.lu.se,  thepmo@selund.bitnet  |  /      \===== g
PGP key available via finger or on request | /e-      \q


