A new contest has been announced over at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild.

If you’ve read through the old NEUC and EAG newsletters, you’ve undoubtedly run across one of the contests held years ago. (This is why there are about a billion Eamons mentioning a “Life Orb.”) They tended to produce some pretty solid adventures. Of course, actually sitting down to write an Eamon is a pretty daunting task. While it’s certainly a lot of fun, to write an entire adventure requires some investment of time. So here’s the compromise:

Consider a large Eamon dungeon in the shape of a tower. The challenge is to write in approximately ten rooms a miniature dungeon making up one floor of the tower using either Apple II Eamon or Eamon Deluxe. You can add monsters, treasures, secret doors, and weapons… whatever your mind can generate, so be it. Frank and I will string them together into a (dis)continuous whole and judge on the basis of pure awesomeness.

The winner will receive a plaque on the glorious Wall of Fame (in Frank Black’s Waiting Room micro-adventure) to be memorialized for all eternity. (We’ll throw in a free subscription to the newsletter as well.)

Go here for all the details and contest rules.

According to the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog, the Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Public Beta has been released.  Additionally, the previously announced “Stronghold of Kahr-Dur” by Derek C. Jeter is available for the first time.  Find all the details and downloads here.

In September, the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog took a look at Whit Crowley’s attempt to port Eamon to the Apple IIGS using HyperCard.  The project was ultimately abandoned, as was Darrel Raines’ non-HyperCard porting effort, for which he produced a “tech demo” of what he envisioned for the final product.  Today, the EAGO blog gives us a trip through that demo.

An announcement has been made over at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog regarding Eamon Adventure #255: Tenement of the Damned:

I’m very happy to announce that Eamon #255 “Tenement of the Damned” has been completed.  Frank Black was able to recover the entirety of the French program and I, in turn, translated it into English using the 6.2 Dungeon Designer Diskette. (“Maudit” is Version 6 and I felt that the English version ought to approximate the French experience as much as possible.) Finally, a menu was put in giving players the option of playing the game in either French or in English.

An official disk image is being prepared and will be made available for download “soon” and a lengthy review is planned for an upcoming issue of the Eamon Deluxe Newsletter.  In the meantime, you can stop by the Guild blog and read all about it.

Frank Black today released Eamon Deluxe 5.0: 

Eamon Deluxe is an enhanced and expanded variation of the classic Eamon gaming system. With the release of version 5.0, Eamon Deluxe features cross-platform portability and an alternate accessibility mode for disabled or vision impaired users. The Eamon Deluxe adventure library includes a growing selection of original adventures as well as ongoing conversions of all known Eamon adventures.

Stop by the revamped website and download a copy for Windows, Mac or Linux, and be sure to check out Frank’s all-new Eamon adventures today.

Volume 17, Issue 2 (June 2012) of Juiced.GS, the longest-running Apple II publication in print, has been mailed to all subscribers. This issue features an interview with Dan Muse, former editor-in-chief of inCider/A+, as he reflects on the magazine’s evolution and legacy. Wade Clarke details his transition from writing text adventures for the Apple II in Eamon to using the modern interactive fiction language of Inform 7. Andy Molloy reviews Stephen Emond’s paperback book, Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide, while Peter Neubauer continues his Logo programming tutorial. All this, and much, much more!

This is Juiced.GS‘s second quarterly issue of 2012. Hardcopy subscriptions are available at $19 for United States customers and $27 for international customers, with several free sample issues available as PDFs.

A new edition of The Eamon Deluxe Newsletter has been published over at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog.  Writes Frank:

I’m writing this blog to announce that an entirely original, 10-page Eamon newsletter was just added to the Guild website. While it is named "The Eamon Deluxe Newsletter", this publication is actually intended to be a place for content that relates to any platform or aspect of the Eamon community and is published in the spirit and fond memory of Tom Zuchowski’s former EAG newsletters.

Read the entire blog entry and download the newsletter in PDF or RTF format here.

Frank Kunze, the man behind the upcoming Eamon Deluxe 5.0, sent out the first beta to play testers early this morning.  Hopefully, this means a general release isn’t too far off.

You can check out Frank’s progress at the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online blog.

The Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online, the place for all things Eamon on the Internet, yesterday posted screen capture images of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 in action.  For those unaware, this is an effort to update and improve upon the original Eamon Deluxe.  A call for playtesters went out recently and it looks like the project is progressing nicely.  A progress report from Jan 9, 2012 is available here.

A relatively new iPhone app called iBASIC from AkeySoft Group brings several old Apple II games to the iPhone. Included are eight EAMON adventures, Life, Lemonade Stand, Hamurabi, and StarTrek. These are all text based games written in BASIC from the late 1970s to early 1980s.

The latest version 1.1 adds “the Apple DOS 3.3 command handler for BASIC programs, so that adventure games like EAMON can use DOS commands to access files like maps and other elements.” iBASIC is $1.99; there’s also a free version called iBASIC Lite.