Posted January 18, 2011
This won't be of use or interest to most people but some of you may want to know about this. Infocom released several versions of their games, fixing bugs or changing little things, but those versions were quietly made available in subsequent releases of their games, sometimes anthologies like the one sold here at GOG.
This page lists all the various versions for the Infocom games as well as patches to switch from one to the other, providing you own one of the game files. In the case of the GOG release, being a copy of the Zork Anthology, I imagine that all games are already using the latest version so there should be no need to update. It can be interesting to revert to an older version as some phrases may be written differently — in the case of Wishbringer, the older version do not have the letter text reproduced in the game as you were supposed to open the enveloppe that came in the game box — but that's mainly something left to the more curious of the lot.
That said Zork I and Planetfall, that are part of the GOG release, are a special case. These two games (as well as Leather Goddesses of Phobos, H2G2 and Wishbringer) were released in Solid Gold versions, which updates the game from Z-Machine 3 to 5, squashes more bugs, includes a new parser and a built-in hints sytem, available from the "hints" command. The new parser is rather interesting because it allows to use more words or construct phrases more easily, and it will also add shortcuts for some of the more common verbs — thus you can simply type "x" instead of "examine", although that particular feature doesn't work for Zork I SG.
The tools to patch the game files are located at the end of the page (zpat-2_3.zip) and the program from the archive you'll want to use is decrypt.exe. Yes, it's command-line. As a 16-bit program, it won't work until 64-bits versions of Windows but it works fine under DOSBox or any other virtual machine that emulates a 16 or 32-bits computer. Observant readers already noticed that there is a convenient patch that allows you to go from release 88 (the one likely provided in the GOG release) to 52 (the Solid Gold release), without the need to patch to many other versions before.
This page lists all the various versions for the Infocom games as well as patches to switch from one to the other, providing you own one of the game files. In the case of the GOG release, being a copy of the Zork Anthology, I imagine that all games are already using the latest version so there should be no need to update. It can be interesting to revert to an older version as some phrases may be written differently — in the case of Wishbringer, the older version do not have the letter text reproduced in the game as you were supposed to open the enveloppe that came in the game box — but that's mainly something left to the more curious of the lot.
That said Zork I and Planetfall, that are part of the GOG release, are a special case. These two games (as well as Leather Goddesses of Phobos, H2G2 and Wishbringer) were released in Solid Gold versions, which updates the game from Z-Machine 3 to 5, squashes more bugs, includes a new parser and a built-in hints sytem, available from the "hints" command. The new parser is rather interesting because it allows to use more words or construct phrases more easily, and it will also add shortcuts for some of the more common verbs — thus you can simply type "x" instead of "examine", although that particular feature doesn't work for Zork I SG.
The tools to patch the game files are located at the end of the page (zpat-2_3.zip) and the program from the archive you'll want to use is decrypt.exe. Yes, it's command-line. As a 16-bit program, it won't work until 64-bits versions of Windows but it works fine under DOSBox or any other virtual machine that emulates a 16 or 32-bits computer. Observant readers already noticed that there is a convenient patch that allows you to go from release 88 (the one likely provided in the GOG release) to 52 (the Solid Gold release), without the need to patch to many other versions before.