Welcome to "Golden Flutes and Great Escapes!"

This collection contains four complete, random event-driven text adventure
games that originally appeared in the excellent book, "Golden Flutes and
Great Escapes: How to Write Adventure Games for the Apple Computer," by
Delton T. Horn (Copyright 1984, Dilithium Press).

As a coding excercise, I chose to translate these games from their original
Applesoft Basic format into the C language, in the hopes that such an
activity would teach me the essentials of parser-writing.  This was before I
set foot on Internet and discovered TADS and Inform.  When I did come across
these pre-written adventure-authoring systems, I scrapped the full-blown IF
parser I had been working on, and thus, also abandoned these games.

Recently, I rediscovered them, and thought some of you might enjoy taking a
look at them.  There are four games altogether.  Here's a quick look at each
of them:

FLUTE.EXE -- "The Golden Flute."  A fantasy adventure.  You and your party of
             eight adventurerous friends must search the countryside to find
             the lair of the evil gremlin Terak and recover the magical
             Golden Flute from him.

ESCAPE.EXE -- "The Great Escape."  A maze game.  You are lost in a 100-room
              maze and must escape with as much gold as possible.  A wide
              variety of items and characters show up to help or hinder you.

TREASURE.EXE -- "Treasure Hunt."  A search for buried pirate treasure.  You
                command your six-man crew to explore 10 islands to discover
                the hidden riches.

MARS.EXE -- "Mars."  Explore the mysterious planet Mars for treasures and
            artifacts left behind by the ancient Martian civilizations.
            Encounter six distinct types of monsters and a wide variety of
            bizarre natural occurrances along the way.
MARSETUP.EXE -- "Mars" setup program.  Allows you to configure the game.
MARS.CFG -- "Mars" configuration file.  Created by MARSETUP.EXE.
MARSCORE.HI -- "Mars" high score file.

Keep in mind that the details of these games are not fixed.  The game maps
and events change each time you play, unlike Infocom's games and most of the
other IF on the archive.  There's a lot to see and do in all of them.

These games are freeware, and can be distributed as you wish.  Also, if
you're interested, I've still got the source code for all four games,
although the programming is a little sloppy.

To the best of my knowledge, all four games are completely bug-free.  Should
you encounter any that I've missed, please let me know.  Questions and
comments are also welcome.  E-mail me at: ceforma@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu.

Hope you enjoy these.  I certainly enjoyed writing them.

                                            -- C.E. Forman