Dealing with judges who can't run TADS


Thu, 12 Oct 1995 17:41:25 GMT

>I think the idea of having separate sections for Inform and for TADS
>should be dropped next year; the imbalance between the votes in the two
>sections wasn't very large: 31 TADS, 42 Inform....
>
>If people feel that shutting out judges who couldn't get access to a
>machine for which a TADS port exists was just too unfair, then why not
>have some system which scales votes according to how many entries there
>were in each section....

Alternatively, perhaps we could *find* suitable machines for judges
who can't run TADS to use? There were only 11 judges who voted for
Inform but not TADS, at least three of whom have stated that they could
have voted in the TADS division but didn't. (For that matter, I had
originally planned to not vote for the TADS division, but wound up
doing so after trying the games in that division at the last minute.)
Even with some growth, there shouldn't be more than a dozen or so
judges that are affected; it should be fairly easy to find machines
to lend or grant access to, or workarounds involving PC emulators.

Even better, we could set up a machine on the net somewhere with a
public account with a restricted shell and a directory containing the
entries, a Z machine interpreter, the TADS runtime, and run times for
any other system that authors might use (AGT? ADVSYS?). Anyone not
able to run TADS on their own machine could telnet in at their own l
eisure to evaluate the TADS entries. Make it something plain vanilla
(like a SPARC running SunOS 4.1.x) and known in advance, and just
about any system could be accomodated.

-- 
---
                   Palmer T. Davis <palmer@ansoft.com>
  Ansoft Corporation, Four Station Square, Suite 660, Pittsburgh, PA 15219
                 http://www.ansoft.com/palmer/home.html