Eamon II & KnightQuest

Eamon II

By John Nelson, John Heng, and Bob Davis

In 1982, John Nelson wanted to move Eamon to the next era with the creation of a new “super-Eamon”. With the help of John Heng and Bob Davis, they developed Eamon II, which showed many many of the features and commands of the later-to-come version 6 Eamon, but lacking the commands PUT & FREE.  It has 4 new spells: CHARM, FEAR, BLINK, & SLEEP.  It accommodates 5 personal weapons instead of the usual 4 of the Main Hall.  It has a total of 7 artifact types, including Shield, Healing, Light, & Shovel.  There are several new monster fields: Low Room, High Room, #Attacks, Greed, Hate, and Wanderlust.  It allows the adventurer to find ‘friends’ and take them along on adventures.  There are 4 professions: Thief, Fighter, Cleric, & Magician.  Alignments run from Lawful Very Good to Chaotic Evil.  It has an Intelligence attribute.  It runs VERY slowly and is an incredible memory hog.  This situation got worse as it grew into KnightQuest (below), and the next thing you know John got himself an IBM-PC with compiled Basic & 640K of memory.

Four disk images are available for the Eamon II system and are provided here for your amusement:

• Eamon II Main Hall
• #1 Beginner’s Cave
• #17 Merlin’s Castle
• Dungeon Designer Diskette

KnightQuest

By 1983, Nelson had moved on from Super Eamon to ths “KnightQuest” gaming system. It contains considerable enhancements over standard Eamon, and was an attempt to approach true D&D-type gaming. However, the Apple II did not have the resources for such an ambitious enhancement. Because of an extreme shortage of free memory, KnightQuest ran VERY slowly and was very difficult to work with. Then the IBM PC with its 640K of RAM appeared, and John moved his efforts to that platform. Set your emulator for at least 3.5 mhz to get KnightQuest up to a decent performance level. Faster is probably better.

KnightQuest has gobs of new features. There are 17 spells total: HEAL, CHARM, BLAST, FURY, SCARE, POWER, HARDHIT, LIGHT, TELEPORT, SLEEP, RESURRECT, INVISIBILITY, FORCEFIELD, DARKSEE, ATTALL, RAGE, & PURIFY.

Professions are slightly different then Eamon II with possibilities being fighter, thief, cleric, and mage. The character can be a either a Human, a Dwarf, or an Elf. The player can speak one of eight languages: Trollish, Orcish, Dwarfish, Elvish, Gerbish, Falconese, Latin, or Welch.

There are 26 artifact types: Key, Weapon, Armour, Shield, Light, Medical, Tool, Read, Key, Fuel, Teleport, Sleep, Vitamin, Agility, Charm, Scary, Cont., Portal, Effect, Weapon, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Resurrect, and Trap.. Again, I don’t really know what all of these artifacts do. Some artifacts appear to be pre-programmed into the system: Weapon, Armour, “General1”, Readable, Key, Fuel, Container, Portal, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Trap.

Four Disk images are available:

• The KnightQuest Master is required to run the other games.
• Curse of the Hellsblade was later onverted to “regular” Eamon #206.
• Amateur Alley is KnightQuest’s equivalent to the Beginners Cave, and was later converted to “regular” Eamon #247.
• Quest for the Firedragon was later converted to “regular” Eamon #248.

 Two custom disks are also availabl:

• Disk 1 gives options to resurrect an adventurer, modify an adventurer, maintain stores file, change titles, change town marshal, reload store inventory, maintain system parameters, create new formats file, change character file length, change rooms file length, or print stock listings, with a small help file describing what each function does.
• Disk 2 is “L.U.R.C. Maintenance.” It lets you change the attributes of the professions, languages, spells, artifact types, etc.