Comment by tofof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tofof | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The article mentions the difficulty of playing Suspended for modern players without access to its documentation or the included 'feelies' (a map, tokens of the robots, an in-universe lottery ticket).

They are preserved at http://gallery.guetech.org/suspended/suspended.html for anyone wishing to attempt the game.

The game itself is preserved at various abandonware sites, such as at https://www.myabandonware.com/game/suspended-1nz which seems to have versions for most platforms it was released on.

The source code for the game has been recovered and is preserved at https://github.com/historicalsource/suspended although there is no currently known preserved compiler that can translate this code into the playable .ZIP format ("Z-machine Interpreter Program", not to be confused with the archival format).

I can attest to the difficulty in playing without the physical materials/documentation. In my youth I spent so much time playing a pirated copy of this game without getting very far. Later in life I learned some more details that really opened up the game for me.

This was a deliberate form of copy protection.

A little bit sub-optimal in terms of communicating that they wanted you to purchase the game: if they told you this was copy protection, you could have just got copies of the relevant materials instead.

You can compile! There's modern day ZILF which will take original source files and compile them into .z files that can be used with a Z-machine.

http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ZILF

An iOS app called The Lost Treasures of Infocom included the "feelies", as 3d models, alongside implementations of the games. Sadly, it is no longer available due to lack of backward compatibility (they never bothered to update the app for newer OS versions).

I have that for windows. I believe it came with a bunch of floppies and a book with images of the hints for all the games.

I also have hitchhiker's guide, with the panic sensitive sunglasses (black cardboard glasses with no eyeholes), pocket fluff (a cotton ball) and a microscopic space fleet (an empty clear plastic bag - afaik)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com