Work done in the last year and a half

In the last year and a half, I’ve done a little cleanup of the code, and also made a couple of improvements.

Most notably, you can now use the dial (either rotary or touch-tone) to enter an “extension” where the games can be started. So you can dial ‘4’ to get Guess the animal or ’98’ for Hunt the Wumpus or ‘0’ for Zork I, etc. Dialing ‘1’ will get you the What can I do? module, which outlines which dial codes map to modules.

The other major improvement is to the Guess the Animal game. I added the Sea Cucumber!

Not really. While I did add several new animals (including the Sea Cucumber), the big improvement is that you can now dial ‘9’ for Yes, ‘6’ for No, or ‘7’ for Repeat the question. This is all to make the games more playable when the voice recognition is spotty, like at the maker faires, etc. This is great on the gruebox phones where the dial is hooked up, but the original phone never had it’s dial hooked up, so I’ll have to remedy that. (But first I have to find it. It is still packed after a move about 6 months ago, and I’m not sure which of the dozens of boxes it is in)

I need to do other games now, probably starting with Blackjack and/or Hunt the Wumpus. Other obvious candidates are Hammurabi and Cribbage, but the text adventures are more problematic. The obvious thing to do is to map words to dial sequences, but how to do that without revealing too much about the game? I’ll ponder this problem.

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