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This is v.1.10 of "Mirror" - Vastly improved!

Please note. Game-position files saved from earlier versions will not work properly with v.1.10 and will almost certainly cause crashes. I apologize to anyone who is part-way through the game and has a collection of saved positions, but lack of "backward compatibility" is often the price of progress.
The Mirror of Khoronz - a text-based adventure game for RISC OS systems
Way back in 1976, when computer graphics were still fairly primitive, text adventure games enjoyed considerable popularity. The genre was created by two Americans, Crowther and Woods, with a game called simply "Adventure". Written in Fortran and running on a PDP10 mainframe, "Adventure" was set in an undergound complex which the authors called Colossal Cave. The game quickly became the most frequently-accessed program on the system - no-one had encountered anything like it before and it proved very addictive.

My first text adventure game for the BBC micro was published by Acornsoft under the name Gateway to Karos and was favourably reviewed in Acorn User. Encouraged by this I followed it up with a sequel: The Mirror of Khoronz. By the time Mirror was completed, however, graphical games were all the rage, text-only adventures were old hat, and Acornsoft were no longer interested. Mirror was made available from several PD libraries but no commercial version has ever appeared.

RISC OS machines liberated us once and for all from the severe memory constraints of the BBC micro and made possible a more polished version of Mirror. The project was begun, postponed, begun again and now, finally, here it is. Download The Mirror of Khoronz from here and have fun! It's a 222Kb zip file and comes with instructions in HTML format. My intention is to produce a polished RISC OS version of Gateway to Karos in the near future (years ago Acorn generously gave us permission to re-release it into the public domain) and there is even the possibility of a third part (The Far Islands, yet to be written) to complete the trilogy.

Feel free to email the author for help, hints, bug reports, criticisms, suggestions etc.

Download Gateway to Karos as distributed by Acornsoft, for use with 6502Em (use the !Run file) or BeebIt (use the !Boot file).

Derek Haslam