Previous Next

The Press is an adventure utility to complement the ever-popular Quill and Illustrator programs. So don't expect this review to be technical. I firmly believe to be technical. I firmly believe adventures should be written not by programmers, but by authors, who have little need for technical jargon.

Primary feature of The Press is the text-compressor, which reduces the amount of memory used up by location description and messages in your "Quilled" game. The program is loaded in from The Quill while your database is present. A short menu appears, the new feature of which is the 'Compile and Compress' option. On selection of this, you are given the choice of fast or slow compression. Fast will probably take around an hour, while Slow can take ten. You are also given the choice of selecting a bias for mostly message or location compression, or an even split.

Does the compression work? I tried The Press on a fairly standard text only game that used all but two bytes of the Quill's standard approximately 30K free memory. On fast compression, I managed to free 9677 bytes, and the process took just half an hour. Slow compression was not noticeably better, saving 9936 bytes but taking eight hours to do so. However, with more complex and varied prose, and careful bias selection, slow should be more impressive (Gilsoft say 50% is possible on some texts). Most people - particularly commercial writers - will always use Slow I expect, unless the compression is being carried out to cram in just a little that couldn't previously be fitted in. There is an option to use a compressor 'dictionary' prepared with a previous adventure; this is faster than normal 'fast', though to most people memory will be more important than speed.

The compressor has useful implications. You can now write a full length text adventure, compress it and add previously impossible graphics. Or you can produce relatively massive text adventures by compressing, adding more with The Quill, recompressing, etc. Using The Expander on the cassette's reverse, you can make even larger games by using memory normally taken up with the main Quill program. However, you cannot add new locations or messages with it, you can only 'amend' them. You must include blank files in your original which can be filled in after compression so your adventure should be precisely planned.

The Press includes numerous other helpful additions to The Quill, most of which previously formed The Patch. The functions, which are controlled using a flag and a PAUSE statement in your original Quill program, include: split-screen graphics of any size you wish (which they scroll up with the text), single command graphics on/off control, a single command restart, some sound effects, RAM SAVE/LOAD facility, the ability to incorporate different typefaces, and a few features which make including your own routines and loading game data between parts of a multi-part adventure easier. All of these are extremely useful and most are vital to use if you wish to market your adventure.

If you're already a user of The Quill, this package is a powerful and easy-to-use expansion. However, if you intend to write commercially, or you don't have The Quill yet, wait until Gilsoft launch their new Professional Adventure Writer.