Like many geeks my age, I grew up playing text adventures, most often those from Infocom. Back in the early 80s, my family had one of the earliest XT clones (A Columbia). While this was significantly more powerful then my friends' Atari or C64 machines, no one much ever produced games for the PC due to it's "business image". And those that did had to deal with the glory that was CGA graphics. About the only thing going for it was that the graphics weren't QUITE as bad as the Apple ][, but we didn't even have Oregon Trail, so what's the point? A friend of mine had a copy of "The Book of Adventure Games" and I used to page through it wistfully, wishing that I could run more then about 10% of the games it featured.

The exception to this was Infocom. ALL their games were available for the PC (and a lot of other systems that were even more obscure, such as various CP/M machines). The reason for this is actually technically interesting. Their games were all based on the Z-machine, one of the first successful virtual machines (the UCSD Pascal p-system, which I had the misfortune of programming in high school, predates it by a year). Note we are talking almost 15 years before Java here. So, all they needed to do was port the Z-machine once and then, hey-presto, they support all their platforms with all their releases.

These days, the genre has been renamed interactive fiction, and is quite active. There is a huge internet-based community, complete with a yearly competition, programming languages and plenty of new works released. In fact, one of the best tools for creating the games is Graham Nelson's excellent Inform, which is a compiler for a slightly updated version of the Infocom Z Machine!

I myself used to be very active in back when I was in college, playing the games and working on my own creations (though I'm embarrassed to admit I never finished any of them). However, back in 1996 one thing I did complete and release to the world was a small Tk/Tcl based mapping tool that allowed one to draw maps of games. I uploaded it to the if archive and then moved on and kind of forgot about it. This was probably the last time I used Tk/Tcl for anything much; the X world has moved on and these days we have much nicer widget sets then we had back then (If I never see a single line of Motif code again I will be VERY happy).

A few years ago, I was surprised and quite pleased to get mail from someone who both still used the tool and even had a patch. I suggested he take ownership, but in the meantime, I've made it available, either out of historical interest or if someone wants to use it. It's a testament to Tk/Tcl that it still runs fine under 8.3! I'd still like to get back into IF at some point.

Download IFMap here