Kaladorn wrote:
3. If someone who has it could do a review of its contents (there's one for Jeff's Frontier Traveller magazine!), that would be helpful. I don't even have any sort of idea of formats, organization, or content involved (other than in the most 10,000 foot view sort). It'd be nice to have a better idea what was on the CD. It might be as simple as a file listing if the files were by topic or by discussion thread or whatever. Or maybe there's more to characterizing the contents...
The snag with this is that it is, as Brett says, a BIG job. There's a lot on there. And some of the individual things are quite large. Most very small.Also, it's a frustrating job as oftimes I try to open a document or an image file or some such and my PC doesn't recognize the file format. (Of course, there may be IT archaeologists who could manage this better than I.) There are also 'softwarey' bits that I can't even attempt to do much with.Also, it's tedious job as there's a fair bit of very very ephemeral material and/or material that's not very well attributed/laid out/coherent (e.g. old letters and bits of conversations - a bit like reading TML!) (In fact there are some archives of TML from 1987 to 1998 in one folder. I've no idea how complete.)So I occasionally dip into it and think "someone really ought to do something with this" and "do I try to include [it's better parts?] in the bibliography" and then give it up (or at least 'schedule' it for the last thing I tackle sometime in the future...) as a project that would not be trivial.However, as a couple of examples:the very first folder on it is ADVENTUR (all delightfully DOS 8 character labelled!) and in there are some of the 'treasures' I mentioned earlier:Deep Shadows (or DEPSHADW) by Mike Mikesha 42 page (18,000+ word) text file that serves as an extension to Shadows (and is thus connected to Research Station Gamma and Twilight's Peak) which it says was planned for inclusion in a DGP supplement for MegaTraveller called _Grand Explorations_. The subsector map and dungeons, sorry, base plans are done in ASCII text! So even if permission were granted, some work would need to be done to make it 'presentable'.Next up is 33,000+ words (over 100 pages although it's difficult to judge because it would need tidying up) of a "tournament adventure" for Gaelcon-89. By Jo Jaquinta, Lesley Grant and Ois'n Murphy-Lawless. There's no more formal title than 'Gaelcon' and half of it is detailed NPCs, much of the other half is Library Data and at the start there are notes on how to run the 'role playing competition'. Not so much an adventure but a rich role playing environment with the PCs as doctors accompanying medical supplies on a luxury liner.Then there are three files called GBV.1, GBV.2, GBV_3.txt, GBV.rte and Gushmege.SUB (see! what a mess!). Fortunately the first two and the last two open in Word and it turns out to be a three part adventure: The Good, the Bad and the Vilani by Clayton R. Bush. The 'rte' file is a planned itinerary through Gushmege sector and the sub file is the sector data for Gushmege which has a DPG copyright on it.In a folder called Shadows there are ten GIFs which my PC won't open but I *think*, judging from an associated HTM file called shadows might be Robert Prior's wonderful colour images of the floor plan from Shadows broken up to reveal to players as they explore. If they're what I saw Dom Mooney using in his Shadows+ adventure a few years back at TravCon (see AAR), then they're wonderful. But I can't open them.And that's just the first small, folder. Which has taken about half an hour to examine. It would take a while to look through the rest but there are folders called 'art', 'tml' as I mentioned, 'fanzine' (with issues of Alien Realms and Starships, Starports & Vehicles in Word Perfect, I think, format but Word happily opens them) and even some material from White Dwarf (which I'm presuming isn't strictly legit).It's complicated, messy and both a delight and a frustration to explore. The adventures mentioned above look, at a glance, to be well written and would definitely be worth resurrecting if at all possible.HTH a bit, even if it's just to whet appetite!tc-----
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