                          AdventureII restored
                             Mike Arnautov
                              30 Sep 2001

(See contents.txt for details of the contents of this distribution.)

Written in 1978 by Peter Luckett and Jack Pike in the then standard
Fortran66, AdventureII was one of the early expansion of the original
game. 

For over a decade, this version was believed to be lost, known only as
one of the two versions merged by me into Adv660 (AdventureII a.k.a. 
Adv440, and Dave Platt's Adv550).  However, such are the wonders of old
archives, that most of the game source was rediscovered when an old
Prime was being wound down towards the end of 1999, in the run-up to the
Y2K non-event. 

Unfortunately, it turned out that while the program source was
apparently complete, the database was not.  The travel table, the object
location table, the vocabulary and the hints table -- all these were
missing. 

That's how things stood for another couple of years, until one September
day of 2001 Jack Pike got in touch!  He'd been sitting in a hotel in the
US and while waiting for something else, idly typed his name into Google
-- and was astonished to see an adventure reference.  The link was to my
mipmip site (at demon.co.uk at the tim) and the rest was easy. 

As I'd hoped, Jack did have the full database and another copy of the
program, but only in two formats: as a hard copy and on an old
DEC-format magnetic tape.  A closer inspection of the goodies revealed a
further startling fact -- Jack's database didn't match any of the
program versions either of us had. 

I won't bore you with details, but after some fairly intense software
archeology work (and, of course, a lot of typing!), we now have an F77
source and the database to go with it.  To the best of our knowledge it
comes as close as possible to being a faithful reproduction of the
"AdventureII experience". 

Hope you enjoy it! 

                               - o O o -
