Foggy London

NOTE: As of 2021 this work by CH is kindly hosted by Veronika Megler.
Contact details of the author may be found at the end of the page.

Wilderland

Foggy London
A Sherlock Environment

Introduction

'Foggy London' (FL) allows you to see what's REALLY going on in this wonderful world created by Philip Mitchell et al. in 1984 at Beam Software / Melbourne House. It runs the original game code in a rudimentary Spectrum emulator, while displaying the state of objects and animals, the current positions of the latter, and a log what all the other creatures (NPC) do while Sherlock is in one place.

source: http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/streetlifeinlondon

Screenshots (click to enlarge)


Starting screen of Foggy London	In mid-game...	README.TXT

Downloads

The download package contains the C source-files, a compiled version of Wilderland, additional files, the README.TXT but NOT the original game-code!

Foggy London V 1.01 (zip, 913 kB)

Dictionary
Room Database Dump

Game Map

History

While researching Wilderland I came upon 'Sherlock' for the first time (I didn't know about this game during my Spectrum-years). Though playing it was tough, the environment felt quite familar. That's why I looked again into the code and many things showed that it was a direct descendant of 'The Hobbit'. On the other hand it was different enough, to promise some interesting digital archaeology (for example the dictionary was compressed even tighter - containing nearly 600 words in appr. 2500 byte!). I also was curious how the complex plot was packed into the quite limited ressources of the ZX Spectrum (this topic is still under research).
Nevertheless I release this preliminary version of FL to allow people to go back 30 years and enjoy this game highlight from the micro-computer area!