The Airlock Collection Text Adventures

Fredrick Ramsberg announced the release of The Airlock Collection of text adventures created with the Puny Inform and PuddleBuild tools. The collection of adventures is available for a number of computing platforms including those shown in the sections below. This collection is available for free and according to the announcement and website:

The Airlock Collection

Welcome to hours of fun on your favourite platform! This collection contains polished post-jam releases of some of the games that were entered in Punyjam #3, which was held in February of 2023. A jam means the authors have a limited time in which to finish their game, so the games often lack a bit of polish. The authors of the games in this collection all spent some time after the jam, reading through the feedback they got from the judges and improving their games, while also making sure their games run as smooth as possible on 8-bit platforms.

The rules of the jam required all games to start in or next to an airlock. The authors came up with clever stories around this premise.

All games use PunyInform, a library that is used with the Inform 6 programming language to produce games in the Z-code format, suitable to be run on most 8-bit computers as well as any 16-bit or modern computer. Several authors in this and previous PunyJams started with no knowledge of PunyInform, and produced their first game in three weeks.

The collection was created with the Puddle BuildTools for PunyInform by Stefan Vogt. This toolset allows a user to build disk images for a game for 25+ platforms. See link below.

https://microheaven.com/airlock/

The games

These games are included, in alphabetic order:

A1RL0CK, by Marco Innocenti
Blorp!, by Shawn Sijnstra
A Clean Getaway, by Michael Bub
Falling to Pieces, by Gianluca Girelli
The Fantasy Dimension, by Johan Berntsson
Lucid Night, by Dee Cooke
Submarine Sabotage, by Garry Francis

The authors are the copyright holders of their games. All authors have kindly given their permission for the games to be included in this collection. The games can be freely played.

You can find more information about the games, as well as the two games that were entered in the jam but are not in the collection, on the jam page, see link below. Some of the authors have published the source code of their games. You can also find reviews, and write your own reviews, at IFDB, see link below. Writing an honest review on IFDB, or even just rating the game, is one of the best things you can do to thank the authors for their efforts.Supported platforms

Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, C128, Plus/4, Amiga
MEGA65
Commander X16
Spectrum +3, Next
Atari 8-bit, ST
BBC Micro, Acorn Electron
Dragon 64
Amstrad CPC, PCW
MS-DOS
MSX 1/2
Classic Macintosh
Sam Coupé
Apple II
Oric Atmos, Telestrat
TI99/4a
TRS Coco
TRS-80 Model 3, Model 4
DEC Rainbow
Osborne 1
Kay pro
Any modern computer

Download – The collection is available as a ZIP file (18 MB).

Documentation – You can read the documentation online. The documentation is also included in the download file holding the game collection, so no need to download both.

Z-code and interpreters

Z-code is a text adventure game format invented by Infocom in 1979. It’s based on a virtual machine, which can be emulated on pretty much any computer. These emulators are called Z-code interpreters.

The Commodore 64, 128, Plus/4, MEGA65 and Commander X16 versions of the games use the Ozmoo interpreter, by Johan Berntsson and Fredrik Ramsberg.
The BBC/Acorn versions use Ozmoo for Acorn, an Ozmoo port by Steven Flintham.
The Commodore VIC-20 and PET versions use BitShifter’s Z-code interpreter, by Edilbert Kirk.
The MS-DOS version uses Frotz, originally by Stefan Jokisch, DOS port maintained by David Griffith
The Amiga versions, except for The Fantasy Dimension, use ZIP by Mark Howell.
The Macintosh Classic versions use MaxZip by Andrew Plotkin.
The Spectrum +3 versions use an Infocom interpreter modified by George Beckett.
The Oric Atmos versions use PInforic by Jose-Maria Enguita and Fabrice Frances.
The Dragon 64 versions use an interpreter by a person called Pere.
The TI99/4a versions use Master’s Interpreter by Barry Boone.
The TRS-80 Model 4 versions use M4ZVM by Shawn Sijnstra.

The rest of the games use Infocom interpreters collected by Stefan Vogt and published in his Puddle Build-Tools for PunyInform. Some of them have been modified to work better or to work with hardware options not initially supported.

Links