Secret Garden by The Sleeping Sphinx THIS PROGRAM IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN Every day, you take the same path to work, which takes you along one of the dreariest imaginable back alleys. One grey november evening you are trudging home when you notice something very odd: a door in the alley wall which you are quite sure was never there before. You could hardly have missed it, as it is bright yellow and unusually large. Curious, you try the door, and finding it unlocked you peek through. The sight which greets you is so baffling that without thinking you open the door wide and walk in. You find yourself in a beautiful garden, bathed in brilliant sunshine from a cloudless sky! Suddenly you sense danger, and turn to leave, only to find that the door you entered through has disappeared, leaving a blank wall far too high to climb! Your adventure starts here; can you escape from this mysterious trap? Notes on playing the game: In order to be able to save game positions, copy the directory !SECGARD and its contents to another disc which is not write-protected. (Alternatively, copy the game to a RAM drive - see later.) The parser of this game is a compromise between the simple VERB-NOUN type and the very sophisticated sort; it will accept several words, ignoring any that it does not recognise. So, acceptable commands are INVENTORY, GO NORTH, TAKE THE KEY FROM THE CASE, PUT THE LADDER AGAINST THE SHED, or abbreviations of these; you may use sensible abbreviations of words, as well. (Commands must be given in upper case.) Multiple commands are not accepted, nor can IT be used. Error messages may sometimes be misleading if too much is read into them. E.g. the message "You can't do that here." does not necessarily mean that you can do it somewhere else! The usual SAVE and RESTORE commands are included. After either of these, you will be prompted for a file name. (Normally, it will be stored in the directory !SECGARD, unless the pathname starts with $.) There is error-trapping, although some of the messages may be a little cryptic; e.g. trying to restore a non-existent file gives the message 'Channel'. GET ALL (or EVERYTHING) is allowed, and similarly with DROP. Note that sometimes a gettable object is included in the location description itself; if so, GET ALL will not get this, and you will have to name it individually the first time at least. You can speed up the game considerably by running it from a RAM disc. To do this, simply configure a RAM disc of at least 140K size and copy the application file to it. (See RISC-OS User Guide, page 43.) The program can then be run by double-clicking on the icon. Note that if you save a game position as just SG, say, it will be saved in the directory on the RAM disc and will be lost if you switch off (unless you copy it to another disc first). If you want to be sure of saving it permanently, use a full pathname such as ADFS:$.SG (with a suitable disc in the drive, of course!) I would suggest doing a CTRL-BRK after finishing the game if you do this, as there may occasionally be odd side-effects. After quitting the game, you will find that the CSD may have been altered; this is a problem which I have not as yet been able to solve. This will not affect you unless you use the CLI The Sleeping Sphinx July 1990.