Those were the days -- though I doubt CompUSA would have stocked Atari ST hardware.

For anyone who might be wondering, no, you don't need any special hardware to experience this pack. If you grab the pack, it includes PNG and MP4 versions of the art for viewing on modern systems ... as well as the original .IG files for people who have Atari STs or feel adventurous enough to try setting up an emulator.

Many of the animations in this pack can be seen on my telnet BBS, Guardian of Forever -- but only with a special Atari setup that probably only the most diehard of diehards would consider.

If anyone would prefer to download the actual artpack, you can get it here.

I'm curious if there are any present-day Slashdot users who ever saw or used IGS (or its later PC successors "BIG" and "CONDOR") during the years 1988-1993. I'm sure it's unlikely, but I'd love to hear from anyone if you're out there.

Hi, this is Josh Renaud, the Break Into Chat guy ... I found it tricky to get TMC to run in emulation on my Mac in 2022.

The three-disk installer did not work properly in DOSBox, for some reason. But it *did* work for me in QEMU, so I installed to a hard disk image.

Then, after successfully completing installation, I tried to run TMC in QEMU. The program launches just fine, but when I hit "play", I hear no audio of the music. I tried tweaking the configuration a bunch of ways, but nothing made a difference.

So then I tried using DOSBox to run TMC from that same hard disk image. And it worked great -- the audio plays fine.

If you try it yourself, I'd be curious to hear if your experience differs from mine!

P.S. After getting it work locally, I zipped the installation, and uploaded it to the Internet Archive, along with necessary metadata bits to enable IA's Emscripten DOSBox to play the program in a browser. Frustratingly, while TMC seems to run fine in the browser, the audio is again problematic -- I have been unable to hear it in any browser that I have tried. I don't understand why it works in local DOSBox, but not IA's Emscripten version of DOSBox.

P.P.S. I scanned and uploaded a physical manual of the TMC Professional 1.3 for anyone who's interested.

Mentioning AI has is a time-honored tradition in computing! Even back in 1988, Kirschen was giving his twist on the "AI" label. From a profile in the Los Angeles Times:

"It's not artificial intelligence," said Kirschen of his system. "It's artificial creativity."

[...]

Kirschen's system goes beyond that, however, creating melody, harmony and rhythm from what the Brooklyn native described as the musical "genes" he has programmed into it.

"The premise is that music is alive, and anything alive has a genetic structure," he said. "What the system does is to extract the 'DNA' from music and allows us to recombine it."

The BBS scene was more heterogeneous than that. Sure the PC was dominant in the 90s, but there were still Amiga, Atari, Mac, and other kinds of BBSes in small numbers. In fact, many DOS BBS games were ported from (or copied from) other platforms. For example, Assassin began as an Atari ST BBS game in 1990, then migrated to the PC in 1995. Space Empire Elite for the Atari ST was the inspiration for Space Dynasty and Solar Realms Elite on the PC (not to mention Barren Realms Elite, Falcon's Eye, etc),.

Anyway, Atari's platform inferiority is one of the reasons Thieves' Guild is like a hidden gem ... its front-end client was graphically much more interesting than most front-end clients for DOS BBS games -- but because it was for the Atari ST and it came out near the end of the platform's life, very few people got to try it.

I don't get what you mean by "inefficient." Overcoming slow connections was one of the *points* of using a front-end client. OOIITERM is a perfect example. You downloaded a ZIP file with all sound effects and menus up front. Then when you used OOIITERM, very little had to actually be transmitted over the modem -- the resources were already stored on your computer. Using the client, people with 300 or 2400 bps modems would see the menus appear instantly, rather than crawling across the screen letter-by-letter.

Maybe you mean that each one was proprietary. If you wanted to use the graphical clients for Operation Overkill, Land of Devastation, and The Pit, it probably would have been inconvenient to keep switching terminals.

You can see the direction the BBS industry was headed if you watch the "Make it Pay" episode of the BBS Documentary ... around 1993-95 there were conventions like One BBScon, there was a cottage industry of books about how to become a sysop, there were even short-lived trade groups like the Door Authors Marketing Association.

A couple other interesting tidbits:

Witte and Flower didn't just sell the game to sysops. They also developed things to sell directly to BBS users, such as a standalone version of the game, and a parchment map of the game's world

CompuServe was impressed by the graphics in the Thieves' Guild front-end client, and began negotiating with Witte about licensing the game, but it didn't pan out.

Earlier this year, Herb Flower's previously-unreleased Atari ST platform game Dark Fortress was rescued, and is now available to download and play.

Seems like it would be useful in exploring how the styles of his books changes. The Hobbit, LOTR, and the Silmarillion each have different tones and vocabularies.