Decent muds and text adventures

[Tony Baechler]

DM wrote:
> Are there any mud users in here? I have been searching for a decent one for
> use with speakup and a text console, as I don't use a gui, just Debian.  



Hi,

Please forgive my ignorance, but I thought any muds would work with 
Speakup as long as you have a mud client.  I admit that I haven't tried 
any muds in a very long time and none with Speakup but when I did, I had 
no problem with any of them except long strings of punctuation such as 
underlines.  In other words, I would think any mud would work.  Is this 
not correct?

To answer your question since no one else mentioned it, here is a site 
listing all muds out there:

http://www.mudconnect.com/mud-bin/mud_biglist.cgi

One I looked at was called 3 Kingdoms or 3k.org.  It looks interesting 
and might be what you're looking for.  The only possible issue I could 
see with Speakup is that some muds use ANSI color, so perhaps the ANSI 
codes could get annoying, but I would assume that a dedicated mud client 
would take care of that.  I'm sorry if this is unhelpful,I am just not 
seeing why the majority of muds wouldn't work without difficulty.

Michael also made a good point about text adventures or interactive 
fiction as it's now called.  There are many, many hundreds of games 
written in special IF languages, such as TADS and Inform.  You will need 
special interpreters to play them, some of which are in Debian and some 
need to be compiled from source.  I can say that almost all IF should 
work fine with Speakup, at least all that I tried.  The best places for 
IF games and more information are as follows:

[Brass Lantern http://www.brasslantern.org/]

[the IF Archive http://www.ifarchive.org/]

Note that ftp access to the IF Archive is very slow.  You really need to 
use a mirror.  You access http mirrors at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/ 
but that doesn't work for ftp.  I've found the best ftp sites to be out 
of the US, since the US sites don't seem to be mirroring correctly.  I 
would suggest ftp://ftp.giga.or.at/pub/if-archive/ but that path might 
be incorrect.  You should really browse the above sites to get a feel 
for what's out there.  Another good source of IF is the annual 
competition which is every October.  For more on that, go to:

[IF Competition http://ifcomp.org/]

If you have any other questions about IF, please write off-list.  I'm 
afraid I can't help with muds as I'm not really involved with them 
nowadays.  I did however do a telnet tutorial demonstrating muds but it 
was intended for Windows users.  Actually I don't think I looked at an 
actual mud but I did look at a BBS.  That's available from 
http://www.archive.org/ with the search keyword of tb-telnet or just 
enter my name.