Hi all, here is Pinforic - Standard Release (in case one
day you have a Gold Release...). It comes from the great
work of Jose-Maria, who offers this way a bunch of *very*
good games to the Oric.

For those who don't know the Infocom company, they
delivered what is called Interactive Fiction games.
If you are a novice, you may say these are text
adventure games : just dive in this world and you will
see it is more than that. Well, this doc is in poor
english 'cause I write it myself, but you will need a
good english level if you want to play Infocom games
(some of them are quite literary), so a french documentation
is out of scope...

Ok, I'm always chatting too much when I have something
really exciting... so to the useful stuff :

The Pinforic program is on this Sedoric disk, you need
either an Atmos with Microdisc drive (not an Oric-1) or
a Telestrat with the Stratoric cartridge.
This program alone won't bring you anything, it's an
interpreter for Infocom Standard Series (a.k.a v3)
games.

So you need an Infocom game (Zork I is now freeware
thanks to Infocom, and there are really bargains with
the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" CD-Roms. Be sure to
read all 3 .txt files provided in this pack). No Infocom
games were sold for the Oric so you most probably need
a friend with a PC, Amiga or else, who will transfer
your game (a file named with a ".dat" extension) to
a MS-DOS freshly formatted disk suitable to your oric drive
(easy if you have a 5"1/4 or 3"1/2 as drive A on your
oric system, but quite a big hassle if you have a 3"
drive). Remember : only one file per disk, as pinforic
will use the same disk for game state save and restore.

Euphoric users playing with image disks must issue an
additional step, they have to first copy a game file
to a real MS-DOS floppy disk, then make a raw image of
it (with WinImage or the tool of your choice) , and
finally convert it to an euphoric disk image with the
raw2mfm tool. Right, this may sound as a hassle (ok,
it is), but you will only need to do this operation
once for each of your Infocom games.

To ease your first Interactive Fiction experience, I've
included two Infocom samplers/tutorials in this distribution,
plus the full game Zork I. They are provided both in
.dat and .dsk files, so you just need to copy a .dat
file to a formatted MS-DOS disk if you want to play
on a real Oric (ask a friend with a PC for the transfer),
and you are ready to go if you use Euphoric.

Don't forget to make a backup copy of your disks, because
they will be read (and written if you save the state
of a game) *a lot*.

Ok, do you have it all ? Your Pinforic disk in one hand,
your MS-DOS disk with an Infocom datafile in the other
hand ? Good, boot your oric with Sedoric, start the
INFOCOM.COM program, insert your Infocom program
disk in drive A as prompted, and hit a key to run it.

Happy Fictions,

Fabrice and Chema

PS: some people are developing their own fictions for
the Z-machine, most of them are now targetted to version
5 interpreters (Gold Series) but you can still find a
lot of stuff at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive.
If you are interested in updating Pinforic for the
Gold Series, contact us...