I posted this in the Zork forum, but figured not many people would see it there who might otherwise be interested in these (plus, they're old enough, many of you might not have even heard of them).

As I'm waiting for the Zork collection to make it's way to the Summer Sale (hint,hint, GoG!), I remembered subscribing to the old Softdisk "magazette" back in the day. On them they'd occasionally throw on an Eamon adventure, which were usually cool as hell (in fact, I remember writing half an adventure myself). After some digging, I found them again, and nearly all of the 250 adventures produced for it (minus 4, I believe) are actually in the public domain! After some fussing (and a couple of hours searching for everything), I got it up and running on Windows 7 64-bit.

Eamon was (mostly) text adventures, originally produced for the Apple II. Each adventure started in the Main Hall of the Adventurer's Guild, where you could purchase/sell items, buy magic, and manage your gold. Then you could pop in an adventure and off you'd go! When you decided to return (or finished the adventure), you'd return to the Main Hall to sell the loot you'd collected. Death, however, was PERMANENT.

If you're curious, it's well worth the effort (and it's minimal). Anyone else remember these?

More info on Eamon: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(computer_game]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(computer_game[/url])
Download the games here (Choose "Entire Eamon CD" for the entire PD collection): http://www.eamonag.org/lists/list-download.htm
Latest version of AppleWin (Apple II emulator; open source): http://applewin.berlios.de/
Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online (main fan site): http://www.eamonag.org/joomla/

Edited to add: My favorite is disk 37: a brilliant version of Monty Python's Quest For The Holy Grail. :)

Thanks. I have been interested in trying text-based game for months. I'll try that

I have been waiting for the Zork anthology to be on sale too, as this is the true hidden gem.

Thanks for the info; I too have been waiting for Zork to be be on sale, because I already own all the titles at least once.

It would be cool (if somehow) GOG could get the rights do their magic so the EAMONs are bug fixed and are accessable without doing the DOS.

You're welcome guys; it's great to see others digging the text adventures. :) Just logged onto a MUD for the first time in years this morning...finally had to pull myself away a few minutes ago!

I'm not sure how GoG would charge for something that's in the PD. I agree it isn't the easiest to get to the games, but with the emulator it's not too bad. Anything I can help with?

Meh,
I like the indie ones better.

Like: 9:05, Spider & Web, Babel, etc

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "indie," as the Eamon daventures were written by many different people over the years. Do you mean standalone, without the main hall? I can certainly understand the appeal of that.

In any case, here's a decent site with many of those games, and more: http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html

I mean in general I liked Indie games made by one person or small teams for free, not so much commercial or big team titles.

Well i've played z-machine titles, some Tads stuff, etc....is this about the same level in terms of interpreter ease of use?

I would say probably not, simply because it's so old. And it's definitely not as pretty! :)