Add Babel Functionality to Your existing collection of Infocom games

To demonstrate the benefits of adding Treaty of Babel support, we have compiled a suite of packages designed to add the benefits of the treaty to the classic Infocom game collection. This suite will take your existing Infocom story files, and wrap them in Blorb containers with their cover art and bibliographic data, instantly enabling you to use them with any Treaty of Babel-compliant tool.

Here's what you need:
• The Infocom Metadata Collection
  • iFiction records or the infocom collection
  • Cover art (A-P) (Q-Z)
  • Babel-enhanced blorb files for the multimedia games
• babel-infocom: a script to merge games with their metadata. Available as a perl program or windows executable

To use the babel-infocom conversion tool, unpack the metadata collection to some directory, then run babel-infocom -from metadata-dir input-file. For example, in Windows, if you unpacked the metadata collection to C:\infocom, and your copy of Zork 1 was called “zork.dat”, you would run babel-infocom -from c:\infocom\ zork.dat. You can omit the -from c:\infocom\ if the metadata is in the same directory as the story files.

babel-infocom requires that you also have the babel program suite in your path. To create blorbs for the multimedia games (Sherlock, The Lurking Horror, Arthur, Shogun, Beyond Zork, and Zork Zero), you must also have “bmerge” from the IBlorb suite, which can be found at trenchcoatsoft.com.