Welcome to the readme. There are the following sections, all of which you should read!

* RUNNING THE GAME
* BACK STORY
* FURTHER READING
* HOW TO PLAY THE GAME


**RUNNING THE GAME

Windows PC
Double-click the fourmile.exe application.

DOS PC
Navigate to wherever you put the fourmile.exe application. Type "fourmile".

Mac
Extract Chipmunk Basic from the enclosed archive. If it is not available for some reason, you can download it from: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
Start Chipmunk Basic and load fourmile.bas, then type "RUN".
Notes: I have also enclosed a fourmile.bas.sit which preserves the Finder information, but the organizers may nix it because I didn't previously declare that that file would be included. Also, please make sure you use Chipmunk BASIC 3.5.7. I have had extremely unpredictable results with the latest version, for OX, which was updated on 9/15/02. The older version is still available from the site listed  above.

Apple II / C64 / Other Microsoft BASICs
Type in the fourmile.bas program. Note: you will need to alter the RND statements from fourmil.bas in the following way. Where fourmile.bas says "k = RND(4)" change it to "k = INT(rnd*4) + 1"  You may need to change the end-of-line symbol to correctly look at the file on a PC.


**BACK STORY

This is a pretty cool story. When I first moved to California in 1993,  I got a job at a small Macintosh magazine called MacHome Journal (it's still around, and better than ever, by the way -- check it out at http://www.machome.com/). It was a neat place to work for a lot of reasons. First, the building was cool. It was an old converted brick warehouse (common in the East, but rare in San Fran), with this open freight elevator, and tons of nooks and hidden areas to explore. It was in San Francisco's "SOMA" district, which would soon be called Multimedia Gulch. This new startup called Wired magazine was upstairs, Might magazine was downstairs, along with a little magazine consulting company that a friend of mine worked at. There were even two arcade games, Rip Off and Scramble, downstairs in a back room, set on free play.

MacHome was the last magazine of a small publishing empire that had once included Antic and STart, two of the best known Atari computer magazines (You can find the complete Antic archives at Kevin Savetz's awesome site http://www.atarimagazines.com/) as well as some RC cars and model magazines, Jim Capperel, one of the original home computer entrepreneurs and a pretty cool guy to talk to. He was (and still is, AFAIK) one of those hardcore business guys who always have a million ideas, and are always just working the hell out of them. (he rediscovered the Mac home market well before Apple introduced the Performa initiative, which reached its culmination in the iMac.) 

Anyway, because the Atari scene (and the Atari mags) had collapsed pretty rapidly, the office had some ghost town like qualities to it. Wired and Might leased space from Jim, but there were still lots of areas of the building that were just empty.

One cool area was the darkroom - we were fully using desktop publishing, so no one ever went in there. It was full of thousands of dollars of expensive photo typesetting machines and stuff. Frankly, I'm a child of the DTP revolution, and while I can Quark up a storm, I don't even know how that stuff worked. I did manage to snatch some cool stuff from the room though, like a stack of Letraset rub-off letter sheets about two feet thick for my fanzine (the sets featured all sorts of neat, outdated headline fonts that are probably just starting to see a resurgence). One time Jack Lyon and I were exploring, and we found a closet in the darkroom. It was packed with old Atari games, including some prototype loaner 2600 carts which I still have. Unfortunately they weren't unreleased games, so they're not that rare, but it's still neat to have the loaner carts.

Another time, I found a stack of bluelines for a magazine called "Antic //" which was apparently supposed to be an Apple II magazine offshoot of Antic, to compete with A+ and Insider. The cover date was August 1984. I have no idea how it survived the nine years to 1993, but the office was like that - packed with stuff that seemed to just randomly appear. One time Jack and I were goofing around in the freight elevator and we found a complete Sega Master System (with Light Gun) in a box that had just been sitting there, still sealed (and addressed to a long gone editor) for like six years. 

Ok, back on track. I asked around and apparently Antic // had never come out, even though film was done and everything, they never printed it. I guess the Atari staff didn't like working on an Apple magazine, and Jim didn't think it was worth the trouble going against Ziff (A+) and IDG (Incider), the two big Apple II mags. I also think the fact that every page was four-color (and thus expensive to print) may have had a hand in the decision: Jim was pretty thrifty.

Anyway, I'm a pack rat and an Apple II fan, so I snarked the bluelines (and film) along with the letraset images. It would have been a pretty cool magazine I think. Anyway, for kicks I decided to enter one of the type-in listings from Antic //. I got permission from the author, Tom Russo, who I tracked down via the "where are they now" page on atarimagazines.com, cleaned up the code for the Mac and PC, and here it is. I also went the extra step, scanned the four film sheets and composited them in Photoshop (reasonably well), so you can now see the full, four-color pages-that-could-have-been form Antic //.

[[

DISAPPOINTING UPDATE
Although I got permission to include this program from the author, I was unable to secure copyright clearance to either the opening art for the article, or the page layouts, and thus cannot include them at this time. If permissions do come through, I will upload them to the appropriate place on ifarchive.org after the comp is over. It's a bummer, because it was a neat project to scan in 4 pieces of film, and put them together in Photoshop. It was not easy! 
Anyway, given that I can't include the .jpgs of the pages, here is the opening text from the article:

FOUR MILE ISLAND
By Thomas Russo, Hanson, MA

Adventure games are one of the most popular game genres around. Although creating a graphic adventure is beyond the scope of most hobbyists, anyone can make a text adventure! The following listing presents a adventure ripped from the headlines of the Cold War: You play Drake Cartright, secret agent, who must stop a rogue French agent, known only as Marchand, from escaping a nuclear power plant where he has planted a powerful bomb in the control room. Oh, and you also have to make sure that bomb gets disarmed!

Unlike an arcade game, typing in this listing may give away some secrets of the game. You may want to have a friend type in the later half of the program, starting around line 4000, so you don't accidentally discover any secrets. This month, play the game and have fun. Next month, in a continuation of this article, I'll explain what the program is doing at each stage, and begin discussion of the creation of a program that isn't just one adventure game, but is a tool that lets you create many adventure games!

Have fun!

]]


**FURTHER READING

If you want to read more about classic adventure games, the following books (sometimes available on www.alibris.com)

Compute!'s Guide to Adventure Games
Gary McGath
Compute! Books, 1984
This spiral bound book offers reviews of most of the classic adventures of its day, from Infocom to Scott Adams to Sierra (including a description of the rare Mike Berlyn game Cyborg). It also offers sections on the theory of adventures, online adventures, hints for stuck players, and a type in program sample adventure. This is truly a classic volume.

Golden Flutes and Great Escapes: How to Write Adventure Games
Delton T. Horn
Dilithium Press, 1984
Delton T. Horn is a classic technical book writer (he wrote a lot of early MIDI books). This book has several adventure games to type in, each progressively more complicated. One weird thing is that most of the games are set on a grid, in a 2D matrix of rooms (so nearly every room has four exits). Still, it's neat to read, and worth it almost for the corny cover art alone.

Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer
Tim Hartnell, Master Gamesman
Ballentine Books, 1983
Another book with progressively more complex games to type in. Unlike Horn's book, most of the programs here feature a familiar map structure, where rooms can connect to an other room. Unfortunately, most of the "parsers" are limited to one letter input. The final program has a fairly robust two word parser. The Forward is nice, and charts a progression from Gary Gygax  to Infocom. It's also cool that Tim Hartnell is called "Master Gamesman" on the cover.

Writing Basic Adventure Programs for the TRS-80
Frank DaCosta
TAB, 1982
I have a hardcover, (I think) library version of this book. Although nominally for the TRS-80, it can be applied to most BASICs pretty easily. It covers both classic text adventures and "graphic" adventures done with text symbols. It is very in-depth and features tons of ways to maximize memory efficiency. Using the methods outlined here would enable you to make very sophisticated BASIC adventures. It also covers the theory of creating text adventures very well.


**HOW TO PLAY THE GAME

Even though Infocom and its top parser were present since before the dawn of the home computer revolution, creating adventure games for the masses, in BASIC, usually relegated you to two word parsers. In some ways this is a hassle, but there were some really good two word adventures done, notably the Scott Adams stuff, as well as some graphic adventures.

Of course, there were also a million free-ware adventures done in basic, either totally home-grown or following the plans of one of the many "how to make an adventure game" books or articles in magazines (like the one this program comes from).

The parser is very simply. Type a verb, then the object. To examine a dog, say, you'd type "look dog." To put something on something else, you'd type "put cat," and just hope the program knew what you meant to do. A lot of times this ended up with you playing the program as much as playing the game, and Four Mile Island is no exception. Type HELP for a complete list of verbs, which helps a lot.

 
