Forums > Game Forums > AGI Tetris > stand-alone?

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) on 12/12/2014 11:40 PM · Permalink · Report

I long wanted to document this -- one of my preferred Tetris variants, actually! -- but the versions I had access to were never distributed with their interpreter. I guess that eventually happened?

If you're doing AGI fangames, I can't wait for AGI Combat!

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Patrick Bregger (298416) on 12/13/2014 7:03 AM · Permalink · Report

I'm using eXoDOS. When contributing, I did not take into consideration that the game may not have an interpreter bundled with it originally. So I can't answer your question.

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Kabushi (260810) on 12/13/2014 9:10 AM · Permalink · Report

Would you like to sort out the various interpreter platforms? I think they would be quite easy to add. Not much of tech specs are there?

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) on 12/13/2014 2:42 PM · Permalink · Report

Homebrew AGI games are typically released in a platform-independent fashion, ready to run on any machine which hosted AGI games -- pretty much anything about the Apple 2 up to 1990 -- by hijacking an existing interpreter.

It's the same question as with Z-code games -- if I write a small enough game in 2014, it can be made to run on a C64, Amiga, in a web browser... well, you can see that Galatea is listed as released for "Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Browser, Commodore 64, DOS, Windows". But really, it was just released as a .Z5 file and users of all those machines could hypothetically import the data file and make it run with external applications. In actuality, everyone playing it was using Windows, Mac and Linux. But if we're tracking platforms for which hypothetical play is possible, then we need to fold in the NES and Dreamcast and all kinds of nonsense.

I'm thrilled to see these now allowed in, in our bold, post-Corn-Popper era, and kind of rue that I wasted so much time and energy here when the games I wanted to document here were not possible to document here. Now that this kind of thing is allowed in, I have no opportunity to cram them in!

All the same, it probably warrants a "this game was distributed as platform-independent game data" or somesuch.

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Sciere (923797) on 12/13/2014 3:51 PM · Permalink · Report

While approving I wasn't really aware it was actually platform independent, it was not intended to set a precedent, I'd prefer the additional platforms Kabushi suggested.

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Patrick Bregger (298416) on 12/13/2014 6:22 PM · Permalink · Report

For what its worth, in addition to the eXoDOS version I also used this download which includes the DOS interpreter. I did not know that AGI games are platform independent.

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) on 12/13/2014 9:01 PM · Permalink · Report

It's a similar situation to PC Booter games being distributed as MS-DOS executables. If you weren't there at the start, there's no clue that the game wasn't always distributed that way.

My memory is vague, but I have a recollection that there was a bootleg version of eg. the AGI game Donald Duck's Playground on a platform for which it was never released, that involved copying the game data from one source platform's version and running it through a sierra.com interpreter from a different Sierra game that was supported on that target platform.

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) on 12/13/2014 6:12 PM · Permalink · Report

Sorry, are we proposing here to sort out a list of hardware-independent software platforms, or a simple list of AGI interpreter variants?

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Kabushi (260810) on 12/14/2014 3:08 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]Sorry, are we proposing here to sort out a list of hardware-independent software platforms [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--] That's what I had in mind.

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Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) on 12/15/2014 7:02 AM · Permalink · Report

Well, the first one would usually be considered BASIC, and there these tabulations typically grind to a halt 8) In that vein if we considered games distributed as source code, other traditional languages for that style of release might include Fortran, Pascal and C. Modern ones would be more along the lines of Python, Ruby (has it any games?), Java and php.

The biggies as far as I'm concerned probably are indeed Z-code and AGI, though even for text adventures alone there are a dozen other minor standards -- the more major of which include TADS, Hugo, Adrift, and Alan.