My staple breakfast. The apples provide a nice texture and sweetness so no extra sugar is necessary.
Ingredients
⅔ cup + 1 ounce of water
¼ cup of Bob's Red Mill quick cooking steel-cut oats
1 dash of sea salt
1 dash of ground cloves
1 dash of ground nutmeg
2 dashes of ground cinnamon
⅓ cut Honeycrisp apple
Directions
Boil ⅔ cup of water in a small sauce pan. Add a dash of sea salt.
While the water is heating, prepare the oats. Pour ⅛ cup of steel-cut oats into a ¼ measuring cup. Put a dash of ground cloves and nutmeg on the oats. Shake the cup to even the oats.
Pour another 1/8 cup of oats into the cup. Then add a dash of ground cinnamon. Shake the cup to even the oats.
Once the water is boiling, pour the oats into the saucepan. Stir, then cover with a lid.
Lower the heat to low so the oats simmer.
While the oats are cooking, dice 1/3 of a medium-sized Honeycrisp apple.
Stir the oats occasionally. The oatmeal is done cooking when small bubbles start appearing, after ~10-15 minutes.
Pour the oatmeal into a bowl.
Add the sliced apples on the oatmeal.
Add a dash of cinnamon to the apples.
Drizzle 1 ounce of water onto the oatmeal and apples, then stir together.
I've baked dozens of types of breads, and this one still remains my favorite. Even before you bake the bread, it will make your kitchen smell amazing. Share and enjoy.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon dry yeast
2 cups warm water (110-115°F / 45°C)
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ cup olive oil (50g)
1 tablespoon sea salt
½ tablespoon dried basil
½ tablespoon dried oregano
½ tablespoon dried thyme
½ tablespoon dried rosemary
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
½ cup Italian cheese
5-6 cups King Arthur bread flour (750g)
Directions
Mix yeast, warm water and sugar together in a large bowl.
Set aside for five minutes, or until the mixture becomes foamy.
Stir in olive oil, salt, herbs, garlic powder, onion powder, cheese and 3 cups flour into the yeast mixture. (Note: if you are using fresh herbs, instead of dried ones, double the amount from ½ to 1 tablespoon.)
Gradually mix in the next 2-3 cups of flour. Dough will be stiff. If the dough is still wet and sticky, gradually add one tablespoon of flour to the mixture.
Knead for 5 to 10 minutes, or until it is smooth and elastic.
Place in an oiled bowl, turning to cover the sides with oil.
Cover with a damp linen towel or greased plastic wrap.
Let the dough rise for 1 hour or until dough has doubled.
Punch down to release all the air.
Shape into two loaves. I like to roll the dough out into a 12" x 6" rectangle and then roll them up to form the loaves.
Place loaves on a pizza stone with parchment paper, a greased cookie sheet with cornmeal, a baguette pan, or into two 9x5 inch, greased pans.
Allow to rise for ½ hour again, until doubled in a warm place.
Score the loaves with a sharp knife or lame.
Spray the oven and the loaves with water if you want a little crispier crust.
Bake at 375°F (190°C) for 35 minutes.
Remove loaves from the oven and let them cool on wire racks for at least 15 minutes (ideally an hour) before slicing.
For the past several years I have been slowly undertaking the monolithic task of rewriting Permanent Eraser. However, such an endeavor has become quite the Sisyphean task as my efforts have come in random spurts between my various other projects. As an interim option, I looked at adding a new feature to the existing app, such as including AppleScript support (something I've been wanting to include for many, many years).
AppleScript Scriptable Resources
Here's a variety of links I went through on how to make a Mac app scriptable. The first three are the ones which I found the most useful and cut through a lot of the confusion of how to get things set up.
When I was doing research about scripting Mac apps, I took a look at other older programs and their AppleScript dictionaries. One of the examples I came across was the stalwart image editor Acorn which has an amusing taunt command, which results in this fun little dialog to appear:
Here's the AppleScript:
tell application "Acorn"
taunt
end tell
Permanent Eraser and AppleScript
After some initial experimentation, I was able to finally get AppleScript to communicate with Permanent Eraser. That's the good news, a basic proof of concept showed that it can work. The bad news is that much like when I tried to implement NSServices in Permanent Eraser the poor design choices made back in 2004 prevent it from working well. To get either NSServices or AppleScript to work with Permanent Eraser will require rearchitecting the app, but doing so will move it much closer to what I've hoped to fulfill with Permanent Eraser. While making Permanent Eraser 2 scriptable is not feasible at the moment, it has been quite an interesting and rewarding trip down another rabbit hole.
Over the past several years, I have been an ardent collector of boxed copies of Sierra computer games, particularly those from the Quest for Glory series. In the past year I finally managed to add an elusive gem to my QFG collection: クエスト フォー グローリィ, the Japanese version of Quest for Glory I (EGA).
I now have a physical copy, but the disks are 5.25" and are intended for a PC-98 computer. Even if this was intended for a standard IBM clone, I would not have a way to read the disks. I think the last time I used a computer with 5.25" drives was back in the late 90s, and even then, those were older computers running Windows 3.1. Fortunately, the internet is obliging in providing alternative methods in preserving old software, even if the original medium has become antiquated. The next trick was to figure out how to play this game on (slightly) more modern computers.
Emulating a PC-98 Computer
While I had not seen anyone play this version of Quest for Glory before, I had seen people stream the Japanese version of Police Quest II, so this indicated that it was possible to play PC-98 games on modern hardware, but this was an entirely new realm for me. My initial research pulled up a couple of articles and blog posts.
On my MacBook Pro, I first tried setting up np2sdl2 (version 0.86), one of the Neko Project II emulators, but it kept crashing when I launched it. I was a little too hopeful that things would "just work". I then started looking at the included file はじめにお読みください.txt, which is in Japanese, so it was difficult for me to parse out the instructions, but a couple of words were in English, such as BIOS.ROM, FONT.ROM, and https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php. Going to the SDL link briefly showed a message that the webpage had been moved to GitHub, which at the time of this writing redirects to https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-2.26.2. This was one initial clue to why the app was crashing. I inspected the crash log, and it indicated that I needed to install the SDL2 library first. I then downloaded SDL2-2.26.2.dmg and installed those libraries. Now np2sdl2 no longer crashed. It started up, made a beep, checked its RAM...then showed a blank screen. I then placed the BIOS.ROM and FONT.ROM files in the same folder as the np2sdl2.app, but starting the app still resulted in a black screen. Any details to configure and troubleshoot are sparse, especially for the Mac version, which doesn't seem to be very well supported, but this is marginally better than Neko Project 21/W which doesn't even have a Mac version.
If I launch np2sdl2 from the command line (np2sdl2.app/Contents/MacOS/np2sdl2), it prints out twice "Device not found", but it does get to an actual screen, first asking how many devices, and a menu along the bottom. After setting the HDD to point to the disk image of the game, Quest for Glory I finally booted in Neko Project II.
After struggling with trying to get np2sdls2 to work, I tried another approach. The most straightforward solution I found was an old PowerPC application called "NP2 Carbon", even though the About Screen says "Neko Project II ver. 0.81a (Carbon)".
I tried this Carbon-based application on my PowerBook G4, and it was more promising than my first experiments with np2sdl2. Once I added FONT.ROM and BIOS.ROM into the same folder as the NP2 Carbon app, it booted up. This program uses a proper Mac menu bar, not some weird Windows 9X-looking interface inside of the window like np2sdl2 does. The audio was somewhat tinny on my PowerBook G4 (more on this in the Sounds section), but serviceable. The sound was somewhat off-putting, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to play through the entire game on the old Mac, but it's a nice option that PC-98 games can still be played on older Macs.
One shortcoming I noticed with both of these Neko Project II emulators is that neither one could go into Full Screen mode. On the PowerBook, the default window size wasn't too bad (since the screen resolution of the 2003 PowerBook was still years away from what Retina displays would provide), but the windowed screen on a MacBook Pro was not very enjoyable to squint at.
Another option I came across was to use DOSBox-X (not to be confused with the regular version of DOSBox), which does have PC-98 emulation. However, I encountered some snags here, as well, as the application could not find the dosbox.conf file. Unlike DOSBox, which has a preferences file in the standard ~/Library/Preferences folder on a Mac, DOSBox-X doesn't seem to have a corresponding preferences file. After reading up about this issue, it looks like the dosbox.conf file is instead saved in the home folder (not where it should be). A blank file was created, but that didn't help. I ended up copying over my "DOSBox 0.74 Preferences" file to dosbox.conf to my home folder. Perhaps copying the file https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/blob/master/dosbox-x.reference.conf might be another option.
I then opened up the dosbox.conf file and changed the machine option to pc98. Restarting DOSBox-X then started up the PC-98 emulation. I then used the IMGMOUNT command to the mount the hard drive image (hdi) of QFG1.
IMGMOUNT C /Applications/DOSBox/dosbox/SIERRA/QGANTH/QG1J/QFG.hdi
c:
cd SIERRA
GLORY1.BAT
Note: To change to the new C: drive, since DOSBox-X is using a PC-98 style keyboard (I assume), not all of the keys are in the same place as on a US keyboard. The colon is the ' (apostrophe) key on my keyboard. This took a bunch of experimentation until I found the proper key. I address in the Issues section how I fixed a couple of keyboard issues, including when the CTRL key was not working for me.
Once I was able to switch over to the new mounted drive, I could see the standard game files. I started up the game and away I went.
It's been interesting trying to interact with this version since it is in Japanese (which I have pretty much no knowledge of). But using Google Translate, I was able to figure out a couple of commands in the game by phonetically typing in the words. Example phrases I figured out: look, run, sneak, rap door, climb, yes, hello, bye.
I get the sense that for non-English speakers, this was probably a similar experience by trying to learn English and when typing in commands, attempting to figure out the correct thing to type. (Consider that the Police Quest 1 phrase "administer field sobriety test" is challenging even for a native English speaker!) Fortunately, it is possible to switch the language input, or show a combination of both English and Japanese (CTRL+L).
What's New
I've lost count of how many times I've played this game since 1989, so it is always interesting to find something new or different. Besides the obvious language differences, I did encounter a couple of other things I hadn't discovered before.
If your climbing skill is not very high, you can fall off the castle walls. Do this enough times, and you can fall to your eventual death.
You can sell the Healer's ring at the Thieves' Guild for 35 silvers (which is not a good deal, the Healer gives you a lot more for returning it).
The Thieves' Guild password in this version is "Blowfish", which I don't ever recall being one of the possible passwords in the PC version of the game.
You can try to attack the fairies (but they will taunt you and then retaliate).
Screenshots
There are a handful of cases where the text and graphics were updated for the Japanese market, primarily the signs in town. Changing the language settings back to English will switch the signs back to English.
As a side note, it was interesting to see that full screenshots taken using DOSBox-X on my 2021 MacBook Pro rendered at a large 3024x1964 pixels, whereas screenshots in standard DOSBox will return the native resolution of the game (generally 320x200 for Sierra games of the late 80s). Since I took a good number of screenshots for this post, I needed some ways to batch resize and shrink down the image sizes. Many of these screenshots were between 1 to 2 MB in size, which adds up quickly when displaying ~40 screenshots on a single webpage. Loading 50+ MB for a single blog post is superfluous, especially if one is trying to load over a cellular connection, where bandwidth is still valuable, especially in areas of poor or slow connections.
I started off by installing the command line utility pngcrush via Homebrew with the command: brew install pngcrush, then ran it against a test screenshot to see what type of gains could be made.
% pngcrush test.png test-crushed.png
Recompressing IDAT chunks in test.png to test-crushed.png
Total length of data found in critical chunks = 1894274
Best pngcrush method = 6 (ws 15 fm 6 zl 9 zs 0) = 853831
CPU time decode 0.321226, encode 4.332043, other 0.009336, total 4.663681 sec
% ls -la test*png
-rw-r--r-- 1 chada staff 857474 Apr 30 21:18 test-crushed.png
-rw-r--r--@ 1 chada staff 1898113 Feb 2 18:54 test.png
That managed to reduce the original 1.9MB file down to more than half at 857KB. A great start, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Many of the screenshots I took on my PowerBook were under 100KB, so I wanted to get the reduced screenshots closer to that size. I then used sips (scriptable image processing system) to resize the image closer to the original game resolution. Even though the EGA version of QFG1 had a width of 320 pixels, I went for 640, which works out well for these types of posts.
That shrunk the 1.9MB file down to 388KB. Making progress. Let's compress the new image with pngcrush.
% pngcrush test-resized.png test-resized-crushed.png
Recompressing IDAT chunks in test-resized.png to test-resized-crushed.png
Total length of data found in critical chunks = 383535
Best pngcrush method = 7 (ws 15 fm 0 zl 9 zs 0) = 280199
CPU time decode 0.038348, encode 0.200314, other 0.002597, total 0.241483 sec
% ls -la test*.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 chada staff 857474 Apr 30 21:18 test-crushed.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 chada staff 284051 May 3 20:55 test-resized-crushed.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 chada staff 387543 May 3 20:54 test-resized.png
-rw-r--r--@ 1 chada staff 1898113 Feb 2 18:54 test.png
After resizing and then using pngcrush, I managed to reduce the 1.9MB image down to 284KB. A good improvement, but this could be even better. Weniger, aber besser. What if we try saving to another image format?
I resized and changed the image type to a JPEG (with 80% quality), which reduced the image down to 147KB, whereas the PNG version was nearly twice the size. Considering that there is no need for transparency in these screenshots, JPEG will work well, especially with the smaller file sizes. That was a reduction of down to 8% of the original file size! Not bad, at all.
Since I had an entire folder full of the original screenshots, I was able to resize all of the images and save them out to a new folder named "resized" with a single command:
For the most part, this game plays similar to the DOS version. The music does sound a little different, though, perhaps due to differences in the hardware I was using, in addition to how the PC-98 computer is emulated. This is my first exposure with a PC-98 game, so I'm not familiar if this is a standard variant between computer types or just how the emulators function.
However, there is a noticeable difference in the PC-98 version versus the traditional PC version. To give an example of how the game sounds, I made a recording of several scenes including Erana's Peace, the fight with the ogre, and the Kobold cave. Listen to hear the subtle differences in the Japanese version.
Trying to get a proper audio recording was an interesting process in itself, which resulted in using Snapz Pro X 2 on my PowerBook G4, instead of trying to jump through numerous hoops to get things to record well on a newer Mac. I briefly detailed some of the steps I took to make the recording in an older post about using the PowerBook.
When I got the game running on a PowerBook G4 under NP2 Carbon, the audio sounded pretty tinny, but that was likely due to the less-than-stellar speakers of a 20 year old laptop. Once I used headphones or external speakers, the PowerBook version sounded closer to the DOSBox-X version on my MacBook Pro. Considering that this sounded a lot better with dedicated speakers, perhaps I should have played from the PowerBook, but this did prove to be an interesting experiment to learn how to play a PC-98 game on various eras of hardware and software.
Issues
This version of QFG1 is missing some of the keyboard shortcuts that the English version uses, such as CTRL+A for "Ask about", but perhaps the concept to ask a question has different connotations in Japanese that wouldn't make sense for the dedicated shortcut. I was only able to figure out a handful of commands before learning that I could switch the game over to English (Sierra menu > Language, or CTRL+L). However, several shortcuts did remain, such as bringing up the stats or telling the time of day.
Unfortunately, the CTRL key was not registering under DOSBox-X 0.83.9. It worked fine in the NP2 Carbon emulator, so I initially assumed I needed to configure DOSBox-X in a different manner, perhaps to use a different keyboard layout. So I updated keyboardlayout in the dosbox.conf file to us. One can also set: pc-98 force ibm keyboard layout = true or the keyboard controller type to at. This also helped with typing from the command line, since the : was not the same key (use the ' key for that on a US layout).
Altering the configuration helped, but it still did not resolve the issue where CTRL was not recognized in Quest for Glory 1. After more research, I came across a bug report in DOSBox-X where the CTRL button not working (PC98mode). This sounded like the same issue I was having, and by upgrading to a newer version of DOSBox-X (version 2022.16.26, which is also Apple Silicon native. I don't believe the official DOSBox project has been updated to run on Apple Silicon processors yet.), this fixed the keyboard shortcut issue. Now I could quickly pull up the stats menu or perform some cheat codes!
Cheats
Even in the days before the internet, I learned about the infamous cheat code "razzle dazzle root beer" in Hero's Quest/QFG1, which helps avoid a lot of excess stats grinding (and I've done PLENTY of that over the past several decades). As I mentioned in the previous section, with the initial version of DOSBox-X I used, the CTRL key did not work, which resulted in the keyboard shortcuts being useless, and it also meant that it was not possible to select cheat codes if CTRL and ALT meta keys were not recognized. The following are links for the QFG1 cheats and debug codes to modify stats, inventory, and other debugging information.
But even if that was not possible, there are other tools which can hack the character's save file which is used to transfer between Quest for Glory games. The most prominent tools I found were QFG Importer and QFG Character Editor. This latter tool is older and only works with files exported from the first two games, but there is a web interface (in addition to an archived Windows program). QFG Importer is newer and is a Windows program which can work with the exported .sav files from the first four games.
Not related to the Japanese version of Quest for Glory 1 specifically, but there is now a QFG1 Randomizer program which randomly switches the location of inventory items throughout the game, which gives the game an interesting twist. It's differences like this which inspired me to play the Japanese version of QFG1 — to add something new to a game I've been playing repeatedly since it was first released.
In preparation of the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I checked how much freespace was available on my Nintento Switch and its 128GB microSD card. After nearly six years of use, the system was finally starting to get somewhat full, especially when a number of games and demos had been downloaded (hence my preference to still get a physical version of games for a variety of reasons). This led me down the path to learn how to transfer the data on the old microSD card to a newer, larger microSD card, but while using a Mac.
The basic instructions to transfer the data between two microSD cards seemed fairly straightforward by just copying the contents of the first SD card to a computer, then copy the files to the new SD card. According to Nintendo's website, it recommends using Windows, which might have avoided some of the issues I would later encounter in my experiments, but I will detail on how to do this successfully on a Mac.
Upon my first attempt to transfer the files, I was getting some error on the Switch that said the new SD card couldn't be read. After mulling it over a bit, I assumed that macOS might have added some cruft to the files (dot files and the such) which might have confused the Switch. Time to start over by formatting the SD card, which can be done from the Switch (System Settings > System > Formatting Options > Format microSD Card) or via a 3rd party tool like SD Card Formatter.
SD Card Formatter
Despite what SDCard's site mentions, version 5.0.2 of the SD Card Formatter is a universal app for Intel, Apple Silicon, and (surprise!) PowerPC processors.
It is definitely a surprise to see that this app is essentially a mega universal binary, which contains binaries for Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc.), Intel (both 32 and 64 bit), and PowerPC. I checked the Info.plist and it does say that the minimum version is 10.5, so it does look like it might be able to run on a 20 year old laptop (like my PowerBook G4). A very welcome surprise, and well done Tuxera. My own erasing app Permanent Eraser was a Universal Binary for PowerPC and Intel until fairly recently, but this is the first case I've seen an app built for PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon. I'm guessing that it requires multiple builds, and then a tool like lipo is used to combine the binaries together.
Seeing this program is interesting and stirs some interest in how it "properly" formats an SD card, which Nintendo says "Nintendo products strictly adhere to the SD card standard." The Switch can format the SD card, and creates a couple of folders inside the Nintendo folder (Album, Contents, save).
The Fix
After reformatting the 512GB SD card in the Switch again, I brought it back over to my Mac, but I was careful to not open up the SD card in Finder (which can decorate a filesystem with .DS_Store files). Instead, I just ran this command from the Terminal:
Where ~/Desktop/Nintendo/ is the folder where I copied the contents of the original microSD card. Then, for good measure, I also ran:
dot_clean -m /Volumes/Untitled/
I had never heard of dot_clean before, until I came across this Reddit post. According to a Lifehacker article, dot_clean came out in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). The Leopard man page for dot_clean says it dates back to June 28, 2006. I've dealt with cleaning up odd cruft in apps and file systems before, so this definitely seems quite handy and I wish I had known about this a long time ago. Despite these unexpected headaches — learning!
If these steps don't work, then try this bevy of commands next:
I was in the process of updating a new Mac port of a game developed with Adventure Game Studio (AGS), and after going through the standard steps, I encountered a confusing error when trying to launch the game.
"MyGreatApp" can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software. This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information.
Odd, curious, and frustrating. Since this new build was using the more recent 3.5.1 version of AGS, I assumed that the Mac shell I've been using for 3.5 was causing this mysterious error. However, I did not have the appropriate shell app, so I would need to go and create it...and in the process finally tackle something I've been intending to do for the past year — make a universal binary which can support both Intel and Apple Silicon processors.
The following steps will create a Mac shell app for an AGS game, which I then use to populate using the AGS resources (cfg, vox, exe) from a Windows version of a game.
How to build an AGS Mac shell app:
Pull the code from https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags.
Switch to another branch if you need to build for a particular version of AGS. For this particular example, I switched to the branch release-3.5.1.
Copy the build_ags.sh script into the ags folder. The script should be in the same folder which contains the CMakeLists.txt file. This will be important in a bit.
Next is the step to ensure that this will build a universal binary so it runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Open the CMakeLists.txt file. At line 6 (or before the project() function), add the line: set(CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES "arm64;x86_64" CACHE STRING "" FORCE)
Ensure that the build_ags.sh script has proper permissions: chmod 755 build_ags.sh
Run the script: ./build_ags.sh
After a few minutes, this will create a new folder named build_release and will generate a shell Mac app named AGS.app.
Troubleshooting:
I encountered a couple of issues when trying to build the AGS shell on my newer Mac, which seemed to be missing some critical pieces which had been on my older Mac.
% ./build_ags.sh
./build_ags.sh: line 8: cmake: command not found
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
Looks like I was missing cmake on my new machine. To verify, I ran which cmake and it returned cmake not found. When I checked my old Mac, these are the details I had about cmake:
% which cmake
/usr/local/bin
% cmake --version
cmake version 3.18.0
CMake suite maintained and supported by Kitware (kitware.com/cmake).
That version of cmake had likely been installed by Xcode or manually installed some time in the distant past. On my new machine, I just used Homebrew to install it via the command: brew install cmake
To verify, I checked the new location and version of cmake.
% which cmake
/opt/homebrew/bin/cmake
% cmake --version
cmake version 3.25.2
CMake suite maintained and supported by Kitware (kitware.com/cmake).
Much better. However, I also discovered that the xcode-select path was not pointing to the desired location of the current version of Xcode. Generally when running a utility like stapler, I will prefix the command with xcrun, which greatly helps in locating the associated utility. But in case of building the AGS project encountered a similar issue, it would be best to fix this by updating the xcode-select path.
% stapler
xcode-select: error: tool 'stapler' requires Xcode, but active developer directory
'/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance
% xcode-select -p
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
% sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
% xcode-select -p
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
Despite some of the unexpected frustration I encountered creating this port, it did finally force my hand to build a new version of the Mac shell app, plus learn how to configure a Universal Binary for modern Macs, which surprisingly turned out to be quite simple.
When I was a junior in high school, I finally settled on a career: I wanted to become a computer programmer and make great adventure games for Sierra On-Line. That particular ship sailed away a long time ago, but a new ship (let's name it Cygnus) has come in.
If there is any silver lining to the pandemic, it has been the creation of new artistic endeavors, which may have never happened otherwise. Instead of spending their time sailing across the world, the original co-founders of Sierra On-Line, Ken and Roberta Williams, spent their time writing books (Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings and Farewell to Tara). But that was not all. The Williams announced that they were working on a new project, something that fans of their games would probably appreciate.
Enter Colossal Cave, the game which started it all for Roberta Williams and lead to the founding of Sierra On-Line and the development of many, many games over the 1980s and 1990s. Roberta and Ken Williams have reimagined this classic text-based adventure game, and it is now available for pretty much every modern platform...including the Mac.
So, I helped with a thing...
...as the Macintosh Consultant for the new Colossal Cave.
While I will never be able to work for the Sierra of old (not without the aid of an elusive time machine, that is), this is the closest I may ever come to it. It has been an amazing honor to be able to assist with this project and combine my love for both adventure games and the Mac.
Adventure on, intrepid explorer.
Reviews
There have been various version of Colossal Cave Adventure made over the years, and this variant is based off of the 350 point version (which is also playable
on the game's website.). It's interesting to see the influence it had on a number of early computer games from the exploration, the mazes, treasure hunting, and then having those treasures stolen! Roberta Williams' games such as Mystery House, Wizard & the Princess, and the King's Quest series borrowed a number of these themes. This is essentially a game from the 70s, but given a modern coat of paint with graphics and sound. All of the other elements from the original (the good, the bad, and the moon logic) are still present. It helps if you are at least vaguely familiar with the text version so you can come in with a better appreciation of the 2023 version.
I have started CC a couple of times and explored around, but when I did finally sit down and play through the entire game, it took around 4.5 hours, but it probably would have taken longer if I hadn't had a copy of
The Book of Adventure Games by Kim Schuette (1984) and its indispensable maps.
As
Robotspacer has shown in his playthroughs of both versions of the game, the remake is very faithful to the original (much to the chagrin of many reviewers). However, the advantage of this is that one can rely on old maps and walkthroughs for this new version of the game. Even the pirate map (Maze Alike) from Schuette's book was very spot on in the remake.
When I first took notice of Twitter around 2009, I did not have much interest in it. It was initially useful to follow a few accounts, but I did not actively participate much at first besides making a handful of product announcements each year. Years later it became more of a platform to connect and engage. As with any worldwide community, a lot of good things came of it, with many great connections with interesting people and topics. Especially in the past couple of years, it provided as an alternative to Facebook, with a wider variety of interactions with people, especially those you may not know as well as more personal connections on Facebook.
Once the internet escaped the walled domains of universities and governments and was let loose into the clumsy hands of the general populace, it has been used for both incredibly beneficial and nefarious purposes. To quote the hermit from The Bride of Frankenstein, "There is good. And there is bad." However, this is the internet, which provides a platform to display the worse impulses and tendencies of humanity with little to no repercussions for such vile behavior. (It took an insurrection for Twitter and Facebook to finally take action and censure certain individuals who should have had any "rights" revoked a long time ago.)
This now brings us up to the present moment where Twitter was purchased for an astounding $44 billion dollars in late 2022. If the platform wasn't already a shit show in its own right, it was about to become a burning circus show. It's simultaneously amazing and appalling to watch how a single person has managed to destroy a company in such a short period of time. Half of the employees unceremoniously dumped, the rest expected to pick up the remaining pieces, bills not getting paid, and now it looks like third-party Twitter clients have been cut off with absolutely no notice.
The IndieWeb and Fediverse
I recently read through the Indie Microblogging book, which has provided a new perception of social media, especially in regards to blogging and microblogging. There is renewed excitement, energy, and enthusiasm for creating again — owning your own content. It is the joy of rediscovering the Old, and learning the New.
Decades ago, around the 2001-2003 timeframe, I made a lot of short messages on my devlog, more as an artifact to the old UNIX .plan file, but a precursor to microblogging, years before it ever existed. I might have been on to something before it really took off.
Sites like Twitter and Facebook make it easy to post, but they control the content and the ways things are run. Consider how many years Twitter has gone without even an Edit functionality to easily fix typos. Much to my delight, such an obvious feature already exists for Mastodon.
There is a benefit of owning everything, with better ease to comb through your own content. If one of these social media silos crumbles, it will take everything with it. So many things have been posted over the years, but as Roy Batty so eloquently put it:
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in [the] rain"
There is definitely a sense of starting over. Things will inevitably be lost, and other areas, such as discovering new Playdate projects, will likely need to fall in the domain of YouTube, Reddit, and developer forums.
Leaving Twitter
In 2014, I wrote the short story Digital Suicide, a story about digital death, burnout, and starting over. Those three points exemplify what is happening now quite aptly. The death of digital properties. The burnout of so much frustration and related headaches. And the process of letting go and starting anew.
Twitter has become the source of so much "doomscrolling" where a single word or curt phrase could cause severe anxiety to manifest. I've seen numerous people take breaks from social media for their own mental well-being; some have even taken a permanent vacation. I'm currently in the process of archiving and deleting some Twitter accounts (e.g. @kq1redux) and winding down regular usage of my primary account. The biggest change I have noticed has been breaking the habit of continually checking my phone, getting that little hit of "what's new and interesting". But it has also helped distance me from much of the world-wide negativity. Not that the world isn't still delightfully mad at times, but it has helped calm the torrential storm. When I occasionally duck my head back in to the fetid waters of Twitter, it feels like returning to a place where you once lived. Seeing what's new, what's changed, and then getting out as quickly as possible as you are reminded why you left.
Even as I was in the process of writing this post, more bad news kept rolling in from a massive security breach of 235 million e-mail addresses to the inexplicable blocking of popular third party Twitter clients. If this is true that third party Twitter clients have been so unceremoniously cut off without any warning (much like how half of Twitter's employees were let go last November), it's just more reason to get away from Twitter and not support it. As Manton Reece detailed in his book's chapter Leaving Twitter, the company has been restricting API access for years, and this might be the final death knell. As of this writing, Twitter has not officially responded to what is happening and if this is an accident or truly extremely hostile behavior towards other developers who have helped support and build upon the Twitter platform for years. Twitter has been crumbling for years, perhaps it just took the new ownership to topple things even further instead of trying to repair the faults.
I will see how everything shakes out, especially with Mastodon if it proves to be a happier alternative to Twitter, or if it will devolve into a similar cesspool of vitriol. Ultimately, this is a way of starting over again. Fortunately, I had not amassed a huge collection of connections on Twitter, and there will inevitably be connections which will be missed and lost, but for now, it involves finding active accounts which have made the move to Mastodon. Over the years I've invoked my minimalistic tendencies and culled through lists on social media, and this might be the most efficient method of trimming the branches.
How to get an archive of your Twitter data (via the website):
More > Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Your account > Download an archive of your data
Note, this is not an instantaneous process and will see a message that says: "We received your request. To protect your account, it can take 24 hours or longer for your data to be ready." From my tests, it took about a day before I got a notification that my data was ready to download.
How to deactivate your Twitter account:
More > Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Your account > Deactivate your account
See you around the chronostream...
An Ode to Twitter
I'll end this by paraphrasing the Scorpions' song "Humanity"
Twitter, auf wiedersehen
It's time to say goodbye, the party's over
As the laughter dies, an angel cries
Twitter, it's au revoir to your insanity
You sold your soul to feed your vanity
Your fantasies and lies
Be on your way, adiós amigo
There's a price to pay
For all the egotistic games you played
The world you made is gone
You're a drop in the rain
Just a number not a name
And you don't see it
You don't believe it
At the end of the day
You're a needle in the hay
You signed and sealed it
And now you gotta deal with it
Another circuit completed around the sun, and well... life is chaos, but it's good to be still around. This past year has been fairly quiet on the software front as I spent most of the time working on the second draft of my current novel. One chapter, in particular, took quite a bit of time since it required a massive rewrite (and is much better because of it!). I also posted an old short story "Digital Suicide" as a bit of a nod to the burning circus show which has become Twitter over the past two months. Since the focus of this site has become a lot more gaming-oriented over the past several years, I also wrote up a couple of articles about Quest for Glory V.
Last Year's Plans
A quick look back at how last year's tentative plans shook out:
Mac AGS ports: I made an update for KQ4 Retold. There is another AGS game I also made a Mac port for, but it hasn't been released yet, so more about that once it is available.
Tested a number of games with the Logitech CyberMan, which became tons easier once I obtained a Packard Bell computer. This sidelines my initial plans to write a Mac driver to work with the CyberMan.
No updates to AGI Studio this year. Potential improvements would involve updating the Qt libraries and making an Apple Silicon build.
Completed the second draft of my novel, working on wrapping up some smaller projects and blog posts, next on to the Playdate!
No real work on Permanent Eraser 3.0.
Plans for 2023
This will be the Year of the Playdate! This curious handheld gaming device shipped last year, which has generated a lot of interesting ideas across the Playdate developer community. I have a couple of small, Sierra-themed ideas I want to experiment with. I might even bring my old game Psychomancer to Playdate via Pulp!
There is another very special project I've been assisting with this year that I'll reveal later.
EdenList 2.3.2 has already been released this year, which follows up on last year's releases for Edenlist 2.3.0 and 2.3.1.
Start on the 3rd draft of my novel. Considering how much time the 2nd draft took up last year, I don't plan on focusing on this quite as much, but I will do some clean up and find more beta readers.
Perhaps make an update to King's Quest 1 - Redux. I've already made one small experimental update, so I might add a few more if the fancy strikes me.
More AGS ports, maybe look into an Apple Silicon build. Fortunately, any of the existing AGS Mac ports I've created seem to work fine on Apple Silicon Macs up to this point (currently macOS Ventura), but eventually Apple will drop support of Intel, just like they did with PowerPC and the Motorola 68K chips in the past (it's inevitable).
I'm planning on making a Mac port of the full version of The Crimson Diamond when it is ready.
If the time and energy is there, perhaps more work on Permanent Eraser 3.0.
Today, EdenList 2.3.2 for iOS has been released and is freely available for download from the Apple App Store.
What's new in this release:
Updated UI for iPhone 14 Pro
UI improvement
Fix for returning to a new, empty list
Verified and tested with iOS 16
This release focused on a number of smaller quality improvements, the type of things which often would be pushed aside for more "important" features in larger app development. I first noticed that the search bar was far too close to the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro, which was corrected by connecting the search bar controller to the navigation item, instead of the table view. I also saw an odd darkened tint appear in the menu bar when transitioning screens on iOS 13 and later, and this issue has also been corrected. It has been a pleasure to be able to continually add polish to this long standing iOS app over the years. Share and Enjoy.
