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Author	Topic: Explorer	700 Views

• Charles
  
  Community Member
  3 posts

  Explorer

  7 January 2010 at 3:40am

  Hello! First of all, thanks to the authors of this website. It has brought back a lot of great memories. I foolishly sold my Apple IIGS many years ago, a decision I have come to regret.
  
  Now for my question. I used to own a shareware application for the IIGS called Explorer. It allowed the user to create simple, tile-based role playing games (RPGs). You could lay out the world map, place NPCs and give them some words to say, and also place monsters and traps. Movement was tile-by-tile, and combat involved pressing the designated "attack" key, and then choosing the direction to shoot your projectile. The whole thing was very basic but my brothers and I had a lot of fun creating our own games with it. You could even open the tile graphics and change them to your own designs.
  
  I couldn't find Explorer on this site (apologies if it is here and I have overlooked it), so I'm wondering if anyone else remembers this application?

• Alex Lee
  
  Administrator
  96 posts

  Re: Explorer

  8 January 2010 at 2:06am

  Welcome Charles!
  
  I know the shareware game you're talking about - it was created by Jason L Smart.
  
  If you download the hard drive image with System 6.0.1 on it, from the homepage or my review of the CFFA card, you'll find it in the 'Shareware.Games' folder, then burrow down into the 'Jason.Smart' folder and there you'll find it!
  
  - Alex

• Charles
  
  Community Member
  3 posts

  Re: Explorer

  8 January 2010 at 10:46pm

  Alex,
  
  Thanks for the reply! I downloaded KEGS32 and then System 6.0.1. I booted with Disk 1, and followed the instruction by clicking 'Change Disk'. But when I boot, and it asks what application I want to run, I don't see a 'Shareware.Games' folder. I probably did something wrong -- never had to insert any of the other disks. Well, unless the solution is something obvious to you, don't bother trying to figure it out. It's not all that important, just for nostalgia. Thanks again!

• Alex Lee
  
  Administrator
  96 posts

  Re: Explorer

  9 January 2010 at 1:26am

  Are you downloading this specific to link to the System 6 + Shareware Games image I've created?
  
  http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/files/harddrive_image.zip
  
  That's a full 32 meg ProDOS image that will boot into System 6.01 and includes nearly all Shareware games released for the IIGS.
  
  - Alex

• Charles
  
  Community Member
  3 posts

  Re: Explorer

  9 January 2010 at 7:22am

  Okay, it worked! I just played an ExplorerGS game for the first time in, well, it must be over 15 years. Wow! What's amazing is that it's still fun, in all its simplicity. Thank you so much for making this available and for helping me to get it running.
  
  I can't tell you how many hours my brothers and I spent with this program when we were kids. We were all into video games (of course) and we had always wanted to make our own games. The GameMaker app was a great, user-friendly introduction to game development. We were so much into it that we would open the graphical tilesets in a paint program and re-draw all the tiles to suit the particular scenario we were working on. How I wish I still had those old 3.5" disks!
  
  For a while now, I thought ExplorerGS was lost to time. My Google searches turned up nothing. I couldn't remember the author's name. But searching "ExplorerGS Jason Smart" just now returned three relevant results, perhaps the most interesting of which is this:
  
  http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/Collections/AOL/Games/Explorer/AaINFOandINDEX.txt
  
  It's a text file with some basic information about ExplorerGS and GameMaker, but also a huge listing of user-created characters and scenarios that were apparently uploaded somewhere by users. Looks like there was a little ExplorerGS online community at one point.

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