To run text adventures on your Palm device, you'll need three things, the first being the games themselves. Over the last decade, Activision has reissued literally everything Infocom ever created on various software collections for PC and Mac. The most recent repackaging, Infocom Masterpieces (shown in Figure C), crams 33 text adventures (plus six previously unpublished winners of an interactive fiction writing contest) onto one disc.

FIGURE C


Infocom Masterpieces: The grand poobah of text adventure repackages. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The only major game not archived in the collection is Hitchhiker. To find that, you'll need to seek out Activision's earlier, multi-volume CD set, The Infocom Collection. It's on The Comedy Collection disc. Naturally, because you now want these discs, they're all out of print -- but you can probably still find them on some store shelves for less than $30. If you still have Infocom games from the old days, they're still good--if you can get them off the old disks, the raw game data is all you'll need. [We also searched eBay for "infocom" and on the day of the search, found 26 listings of Infocom products being auctioned off. -- DG]

Of course, you could just leech files like the rest of the world. To promote a multimedia sequel to Zork last year, Activision gave away the original three Zork games as freebies; you can still download them, guilt-free, from various fan sites. See the Product Availability and Resources section at the end of this article for more information. Additionally, there is a teeming community of independent fans and writers who create their own games every year for fun and profit (but mostly fun). There's plenty of quality, free stuff out there if you look.

How do I get these games into my Palm device?
I know, I know--get to the Palm stuff. Once you've got some games to play, you'll need to convert them from their native, open-platform "Z-machine" language (named in honor of Zork, of course) to a Palm database file. For this, you must use Zip Wrapper for Macintosh or MakePRC for PCs. You can download either of these from the many Palm download sites across the Web.

Of the two, Zip Wrapper is much easier to use, thanks to drag-and-drop simplicity (the PC version is a port of the Mac app). I dumped five of my favorite games, including the Lovecraftian adventure The Lurking Horror and the wordplay romp Nord & Bert, directly from application file to Palm format on my Mac at work in about five minutes. If you're copying the game files from a PC disk or an obsolete format like TRS-80 or Apple II, all you should need to convert is the raw .DAT file; most of the other things on the disk are platform-specific. Of course, there are separate challenges involved in moving (or even finding) the old TRS-80 or Apple II format files, which is why the PC collections are a better source for the old games.

Not all games will survive the conversion-later releases like Arthur, Journey, and Bureaucracy all used graphic elements of one kind or another and therefore won't play through a Palm interpreter--but most of The Classics will work fine.