Audyssey; Games Accessible to the Blind Issue 26: January/February, 2001 Edited by Michael Feir Fun, Friendship, Knowledge, Charity +++ Welcome Welcome to the 26th issue of Audyssey. This magazine is dedicated to the discussion of games which, through accident or design, are accessible to the blind either with or without sighted assistance. In this issue, Jay Pellis gives us an excellent article about the ins and outs of emulation. David Lant has vanquished one of the toughest IF games ever to emerge, and has lived to tell the tale. Zform and MindsEye 2 have given us updates on what they're up to. Also, Tony Baechler has provided us with reviews of many games from the IF competition. Note: This magazine uses plus-signs as navigation markers. Three plus-signs are placed above any articles or sections. Within these sections, two plus-signs denote the start of a new sub-section. Smaller divisions are marked by a single plus-sign. This allows people to use their search capabilities to go quickly to the next division they are interested in. For instance, the "Letters" section is preceded by three plus-signs. Each letter within it has two plus-signs before it. Answers to letters have a single plus-sign before them. +++ Distribution Information and Submission Policies This magazine is published on a bimonthly basis, each issue appearing no earlier than the twentieth of every other month. All submissions to be published in an issue must be in my possession a minimum of two days before the issue is published. I now use MS-Word to produce Audyssey, and can therefore accept submissions in pretty much any format. They may be sent either on a 3.5-inch floppy disk, or via e-mail to my Sympatico address. I will give my home address and my Sympatico address at the end of the magazine. Please write articles and letters about games or game-related topics which interest you. They will likely interest me, and your fellow readers. This magazine should and can be a highly interesting and qualitative look at accessible gaming. To insure that high quality is maintained, I'll need your written contributions. I reserve the right to unilaterally make changes to submissions if I deem it necessary to improve them grammatically or enhance their understandability. I will never make changes which will alter the spirit of a submission. All submissions must be in English. However, people need not be great writers to have their work appear in Audyssey. Many of our community come from different countries. Others are quite young. Where possible, I try to preserve their different styles of expression. The richness that this adds to the Audyssey experience far outweighs any benefits gained from having everything in prose so perfect as to be devoid of life. Audyssey is a community and magazine built on the need for blind people to have fun. There are no formal structural requirements for submissions. Within reason, they may be as long as necessary. Game reviews should all clearly state who created the game being examined, where it can be obtained, whether it can be played without sighted assistance, and any system requirements or other critical information. Although profanity is by no means banned, it should not be used gratuitously. Submissions not published in a current issue will be reserved for possible use in future issues if appropriate. Those who are on the Audyssey discussion list should be aware that I often put materials from the list in the "Letters" section if I feel that they warrant it. Anything posted to this discussion list that in some way stands out from the common and often lively ongoing discourse will be considered fair game for publishing unless it contains the author's wish that it not be published. Until now, this practice has been commonly consented to. From now on, it is now officially a policy of the Audyssey community. This magazine is free in its electronic form, and will always remain so. PCS needs to charge a subscription cost to cover the disks and shipping costs that it incurs by making the magazine available on disk. I'm writing this magazine as much for my own interest as for everyone else's. Your articles, reviews, and letters, as well as any games you might care to send me, are what I'm after. Send any games, articles, letters, or reviews via E-mail, or on a 3.5-inch disk in a self-addressed mailer so that I can return your disk or disks to you once I have copied their contents onto my hard drive. Please only send shareware or freeware games. It is illegal to send commercial games unless you are their creator or have obtained permission to do so. By sending me games, you will do several things: first, and most obviously, you will earn my gratitude. You will also insure that the games you send me are made available to my readership as a whole. As a further incentive, I will fill any disks you send me with games from my collection. No disk will be returned empty. If you want specific games, or specific types of games, send a message in ASCII format along. If you have a particular game that you need help with, and you are sending your questions on a disk anyhow, include the game so that I can try and get past your difficulty. If you can, I recommend that you send e-mail. Thanks to my new computer, I can now send and receive attachments with ease. This way, no money will be wasted sending me a game I already have, and you'll get my reply more quickly. You are responsible for shipping costs. That means, either use a disk mailer which has your address on it, and is either free matter for the blind, or is properly stamped. I can and will gladly spare time to share games and my knowledge of them, but cannot currently spare money above what I spend hunting for new games. I encourage all my readers to give my magazine to whoever they think will appreciate it. Up-load it onto web pages and bulletin board systems. Copy it on disk for people, or print it out for sighted people who may find it of value. The larger our community gets, the more self-sustaining it will become. There are now several ways of obtaining Audyssey. Thanks to ESP Softworks, there is once again a distribution list for those who want to receive Audyssey via E-mail. To subscribe to the distribution list so that you receive all future issues, the direct URL to the subscription form is: http://www.espsoftworks.com/forms/audyssey_to.asp You may also refer a friend and pass onto them the current issue as well as an introduction e-mail explaining the magazine in detail. Then, if they wish to subscribe they will be referred to this form. The form is available from the Audyssey Magazine section of the ESP Softworks web-site. To get there directly, go to: http://www.espsoftworks.com/textonly/audyssey/audyssey.html The Audyssey section also contains all back-issues of Audyssey if you want to get caught up with events. Travis Siegel has set up a list to facilitate discussions among readers between issues. Anyone participating in the discussion list will have issues of Audyssey automatically sent to them via E-mail. Representatives from all major developers of games for the blind are actively participating on the list. All staff members of Audyssey are also participating. If you want an active role in shaping the future of accessible games, this is where you can dive right in. To subscribe to this discussion list, send a message to: listserv@softcon.com with "subscribe Audyssey" in the body of the message. To post to the discussion list, send your messages to: audyssey@softcon.com Stan Bobbitt has made Audyssey Magazine available in HTML format for easy on-line browsing. To take advantage of this, you are invited to visit: http://www.geocities.com/sbobbitt21/audall.html People can easily and quickly navigate through the various articles and reviews, and directly download or visit the sites of the games that interest them. This will be of especial benefit for sighted people who wish to make use of Audyssey and/or join the growing community surrounding it. The Audyssey community thanks Mr. Bobbitt for his continued efforts on its behalf in this matter. You can also find all issues of Audyssey on the Internet on Paul Henrichsen's web site at: www.henrichsen.org J.J. Meddaugh has long been famous in the Audyssey community. He has now started his own web-site called The Blind Community. All issues of Audyssey are there in zipped files in the file centre. The site is at: www.blindcommunity.com If you have web access, Audyssey now has an official web-page, maintained by Igor Gueths at: www.concentric.net/~igueths Besides having all issues of Audyssey available for down-load, six megabytes of storage space are available for popular games. Another source for back-issues of Audyssey and accessible games is provided by Kelly Sapergia. He was our first interactive fiction expert, and has put his Internet skills and resources to splendid use for the magazine. Visit his site at: http://ksapergia.cjb.net If you have ftp access, all issues are also available at Travis Siegel's ftp site: ftp://ftp.softcon.com Look in the /magazines directory. For those of you who have trouble finding some of the software discussed in this magazine, or if you know someone who doesn't have access to the Internet, but would be interested in the magazine, this magazine is now available on disk. PCS has agreed to distribute Audyssey, as well as selected shareware or freeware software on disk for ten dollars US per year. To subscribe to Audyssey on disk, contact them at: Personal Computer Systems 551 Compton Ave. Perth Amboy N.J. 08861 Phone (732)-826-1917 E-mail: pvlasak@monmouth.com +++ Contents: Welcome Distribution Information and Submission Policies Contents From The Editor Letters Voices of Audyssey Reliving the Classics The Gamers Rescue Unit Free Game Winner News From MindsEye2 News From PCS News From Zform DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS Game Announcements and Reviews Contacting Us +++ From The Editor: Hello, everyone. The past while has been hectic for many of us, myself included. Many plans have been forcibly changed. This is true for the Audyssey staff and for two of the game developers who we've all come to know. You'll notice a distinct lack of articles in this issue. Three of our staff members had problems coming up with items this month. This is exactly the kind of situation I hope to avoid in the future, and have tried to avoid in the past. It proves just how important it is for you readers to continue to submit material to let me build the best issues of Audyssey that I can. There are a number of areas where I'd like people to become staff members. In particular, I'd like somebody with time on their hands to look into web-based games for us. I'd also like somebody to look into educational games and how games not designed to be educational can be used to teach things. To be a staff member, you must be willing to commit to attempting to have something for each issue of Audyssey. This can either be an article or review. You also commit to becoming knowledgeable about the kind of games you examine for us. All staff members must belong to the Audyssey discussion list and actively try to answer questions pertaining to your area of expertise. Wherever possible, staff members should look for ways to make game developers aware of blind players who play the kinds of games which they are expert in. Paul Silva suggested that we should send reviews of games to those who produced them in hopes of increasing awareness of blind gamers and of Audyssey. I think this is an excellent idea, and hope all of you will begin to do this. For the moment, these positions are strictly voluntary. However, if I can get funding to start the organisation for the blind which I want to set up, staff members will get first crack at being paid writers. Regarding this organisation, I promised you an update on that. We haven't been able to get together in quite a while now. We all have our lives to carry on with, and personal responsibilities have kept us from making much progress lately. We have done some preliminary estimations of how much funding we need and what we want to do initially assuming that we get it. I have put a lot of time into building the portion of the site that I'll be in charge of. This will be the recreational part of the community. Audyssey will be a large part of this, and elements from the Audyssey Plus plan proposed back when I still had a job at Campus2Day will be used. I hope to be able to tell you more by the time the next issue comes out at the end of March. I have now switched from CompuServe to my new DSL account. My old E-mail address no longer works, so please use my new one. It is as follows: Mikefeir@sympatico.ca The new DSL connection is making things a whole lot easier and speedier for me. I hope I never have to go back to a dial-up connection, and extend my sympathies to all who are stuck using one. "Where is MonkeyBusiness?" and "When will Shades of Doom be out" are two very popular questions at the moment. No official updates have been sent from either of the game developers responsible for these questions. James North is trying his level best to juggle working on his game with completing Microsoft exams. I have no idea how he has done this without losing grip on his sanity, but he's managing somehow. By staying open and embarking on producing MonkeyBusiness, he has demonstrated a lot of faith in us. I would ask and hope that we can all show him the same courtesy and be patient. David Greenwood is going out of the country for a while. This will explain why we won't hear much about his long-anticipated game for the next while. It is quite cold here, even in central Canada. Despite being as eager as everyone else to play the finished product, I can't blame him a bit unless he goes to the arctic or something. There are times when it can help a great deal to go away and gain a new perspective on things. I hope that this trip gives Mr. Greenwood new ideas and fortitude to continue working on great games. An interesting site I came across recently is: www.scotos.com It is a new company which will offer text-based multi-player games. I have inquired whether these will be accessible to the blind, and received the answer that they will look into how feasible it is to make them accessible. They are a fairly small outfit, but seem willing to at least look into accessibility. Anyone with expertise in making web-sites accessible might want to look into helping out. Brian Moriarty of Infocom fame is involved with this company, and Infocom fans among us know him for a great story-teller. I'd say it was worth any efforts we could make to help them decide to be accessible. Many new readers have joined us over the past while. I would be remiss in my duties as leader of this community if I failed to welcome them. I hope all of you find this magazine and the growing community of readers to be an exciting and enjoyable one. I also hope that you'll choose to participate in keeping Audyssey going by writing letters, articles, and reviews for your fellow readers to enjoy. Before I depart, there is one more item to deal with. Until further notice, I would advise gamers wanting to talk to other gamers to use the "games people play" room at: www.for-the-people.com It uses the Lipstream audio chat software which seems to be what the majority of people like. Remember to hold down the control key when you want to speak. For now, no formal chats will be scheduled. The room is available most of the time. Dave Sherman is conducting Dungeons and Dragons games in this room on Sundays. Randy hammer is taking a break as dungeon master for the time being. Times for these Dungeons and Dragons games are posted on the schedule at the for-the-people site. Use either the Audyssey discussion list and/or the for-the-people E-mail list to see if anybody wants to get together for a conversation. Eventually, I hope we'll resume having formal conversations again. We'll see how informal chats work out in the mean-while. With that final item of business taken care of, I'll leave you to enjoy the rest of this issue of Audyssey. May it add splendour to the start of this new year and millennium. +++ Letters: ++ From Tony Baechler: Hello all. Audyssey is now available in a Braille digital file. This is the same format used by the NLS for Web Braille and by the International Electronic Braille Library. If you have an embosser or suitable notetaker, you can download the following file and read it directly. If not, you have no reason for wanting this file and should read the ASCII or HTML versions of Audyssey. This is perfect if you want a Braille copy to read while you are away from the computer. It is also perfect for schools and educational institutions who want to make copies available for students. Likewise, if you are a blind teacher, this might be useful to you. The possibilities are unlimited. The inspiration for this project is the NLS and how wonderful the Web Braille project has been for me. For the first time ever, I can read books published in this century. I can read news magazines within days of publication instead of months. I thought that if this can be done so easily, I could surely do the same thing with Audyssey. So, I loaded my OCR program, opened the text version, saved it in brf format and had a look. I did not closely examine it, but what I saw looked good enough. There are still some formatting issues to be addressed though. I am interested in comments. The file is at: ftp://baechler.net/aud25.brf It is probably too big for one volume if you are planning to emboss it. I am interested in feedback from someone who is a very good grade II Braille reader. I am already looking into some possible reformatting because the plus signs are not very useful in Braille. Help with this would also be appreciated. If you have software that can work with Braille files that is a plus but not necessary. Depending on the difficulty in reformatting, I hope to have all issues of Audyssey available in this format before the next issue comes out. Consider this my Christmas present to the blind gaming community. I may post updates to the file already posted without announcing them here, so if you are interested in following this check the ftp site often. It takes almost no time at all to convert and save an issue in Braille, so once the issues surrounding this are worked out I should be able to convert things fairly quickly. One last note. I did not mention this to our excellent editor, but I hope he does not mind. This is just one more way to spread the magazine around. + No need to worry, Tony. That was a very thoughtful idea, and I certainly appreciate anything that might expand our audience. By taking this step, Tony has given me pause to think more about the formatting of the magazine than I had previously. As I indicated on the discussion list, I always have and always will be more concerned with good content than good format. However, I have taken some time to figure out how to make a template for the magazine. Ironically, the instant I come up with a standard template, abnormal conditions forced this issue to be somewhat different than others. Despite this, I hope that all of you, as well as Tony, will send feedback regarding anything I can do to make the template better, and whether it makes much difference for you. I doubt that it will have much of an effect in terms of reading with speech synthesisers, but having heard the material often while proof-reading and manipulating it, I could be somewhat biased. Once again, my thanks to you, Tony. ++ From David Lant: Yippee! Yeehaar! Woohoo! Ahem... I'm pleased to announce my satisfactory arrival at the termination of this long and taxing interactive fiction title. I'm wondering, if I write a hint file for it, what format would most people be interested in? I was thinking about the Universal Hint System, but it appears you have to get permission from the UHS publishers before creating new hints, and the source editor is a little quirky. but it would be my preferred medium, as it allows gradual hints rather than a straight, boring walkthrough. For those of you still slogging through the game, it is well worth it. That is, if you are prepared to work hard, and occasionally do things for no readily apparent reason, other than it gets you further on in the game. I suppose I ought to write a review for the next issue of Audyssey too. Gaming is becoming *such* hard work these days. + Congratulations are definitely in order here. It's been quite a while since a game produced as much discussion as Harowine's Mantle. I didn't think anybody would solve that thing for a year. Showing both humbleness and sheer generosity, our Mr. Lant has always been ready to offer help to those of us less brilliant. He has also graced this issue of Audyssey with an excellent and thorough review of the game that drove us all to distraction. You'll find it later in this issue. He's also graced this issue with an excellent bit of game-related fiction which will hopefully inspire more interactivity among our readers. Were I wearing one, Mr. Lant, my hat would be off to you. ++ Despite the many advances over the past while, classic games still call to members of the Audyssey community. Unfortunately, it is harder for some of us to play DOS-based games these days. Below, I present you with the contents of two letters sent to the Audyssey discussion list by Brent Reynolds: HI, There are several good DOS screen readers, and some of them are small enough that they can be loaded into upper memory. These include the best of all of them, ASAP, from MicroTalk. It is still sold, but you can run the fully-function demo and occasionally need to shut up the nag message about registering the product. TinyTalk is fairly good and uses very little memory. Like ASAP, TinyTalk, and Vocal-Eyes, another screen reader which uses little memory, supports just every hardware synthesiser on the market. ASAP even has a "generic" synthesiser control table you can use to tailor the program to work with synthesisers that might not be supported. You can also get Provox, Dr. Charles Hallenbeck's DOS screen reader for free, including the program source code if you feel really adventurous. Check out: http://www.microtalk.com/ ftp://ftp.microtalk.com/asap/asapdemo.exe http://www.gwmicro.com/ ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com/ve/vedemo.zip http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh/software.html I don't have the URL handy at the moment for TinyTalk. Another possibility is the DOS screen reader, Flipper, which has been abandoned by its developer who has told owners that they can do whatever they like with the program, including giving it away to anybody. The source code, however, has not been released to the public as far as I know. On the Dolphin Access website: http://www.dolphinusa.com/ you can find a freely available older version of their Hal screen reader for DOS, called Hal Lite, and available in a file called hl.zip version 4.0, I believe, two or three versions back from the last DOS version. Hal only supports Dolphin's own synthesisers most of which are named for Greek and Roman deities like, Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, etc. It's clunky and kludgy, and clumsy, but if you can put up with its quirks, JAWS for DOS is free and is on the web and FTP sites of Freedom Scientific, the current owner of record: http://www.hj.com/ http://www.blazie.com/ http://www.freedomscientific.com/ With all these screen readers except ASAP, you will need a line in a config.sys file that says: switches=/c to force the DOS component of Windows 9X to send all output through the BIOS routines like the older versions of DOS did, thus slowing down your responsiveness. ASAP is the only DOS screen reader that works with Windows 95 and Windows 98 native display conventions for DOS output. It is just one of many, many reasons why ASAP stands head and shoulders above and beyond every other DOS screen reader ever written for English language voice-output systems. Second letter: HI, Guys, The obvious reason that DOS screen readers don't work with software synthesisers is the simple fact that except for that turkey created by Creative Labs, there are no DOS software synthesiser programs. They are all Windows programs. SmoothTalker was a bomb from the get-go, even though the developers of JAWS, TinyTalk, and ASAP and Vocal-Eyes all experimented with trying to use it. That SmoothTalker program required 180K of conventional memory only. Add in JAWS for DOS versions 2.2 and later with command-line switches needed to support macros and environments for WordPerfect for DOS, and you've already used up a little over half of that 640K of conventional memory!, and you still have not accounted for loading DOS, let alone any actual working application you want to run. Add to that the fact that Smoothtalker allowed no interactive control of reading, stopping, starting, or other interactive features needed to read and scan by word, sentence, or paragraph, and you have a worthless "software synthesiser" program. To keep it on topic for a gamers' list, all serious DOS games that went beyond the original text-adventure models, required a lot of free DOS memory in order to run, many of them could not be loaded into high memory, and a large number if not most of them did not like to share memory or CPU cycles, or any other resources with other running applications other than DOS and maybe a video driver and a soundcard support service program. Adding a screen reader already cramps the style of those games, so that screen reader had better be small, able to be loaded into high memory, and not be paired with a synthesiser that needs large drivers to be loaded in order to run the synthesiser. That basically makes the Dectalk a lousy gamer's choice for a synthesiser since, with most screen readers, it need to have large, buggy, inefficient drivers loaded before the screen reader loads. Speaking of that DecTalk PC, Artic released a version of BusinessVision, their DOS screen reader for the DecTalk which supported it directly without the need to load the DecTalk drivers. HJ released a beta program in 1995 or 1996 of the JAWS EXE files for the DecTalk which addressed the hardware directly and did not require the drivers. Either that one was considered not quite stable enough to be ready for prime time, or they decided to abandon any further development on JAWS for DOS in the middle of working on that implementation of JAWS 2.31 for the DecTalk. The DecTalk direct support is not included in, or available for, the free distribution of JAWS 2.31 for DOS. Finally, one other DOS screen reader was the SlimWare for DOS screen reader put out by synthaVoice, the people who do WindowBridge and WindowBridge 2000. ++ One widely discussed topic this time around was how people kept their bearings while playing text adventures. From a thread called "mapping IF", I chose the following sample letters: + Tony Baechler: Hello. This question has been of interest to me for awhile, especially with the recent competition. I am curious how other people handle this. How do you go about mapping an IF game? OK, I think it would be hard to actually map a game, but how do you keep track of the geography? What if you are playing a big game like Curses and get lost? How do you keep track of your location and where objects are? I am really interested in what the community comes up with. + Jak Goodfellow: hello, when playing large games, I will try and drop objects in rooms that I don't need. then using such software as note pad, write down the object name alongside the room description, and what course I previously took from that room to help me choose another path. it's not often however that I bother to map if games, as it can be a very tedious process and will only my self do it when necessary. + Paul & Gail Nimmo: Hi all, you know I had to think about this one? I.e., how do I map. My brain does it. I sort of feel as if I'm there. I remember relational data in big places just as I do if walking around a large city or navigating it by other means, I've always found this relatively easy. I guess this really doesn't help you since I can't really explain the actual technique I use but there's my 2 cents worth,