Apple Mac OS X tips and tweaks

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Play a Terminal adventure game on the Apple Mac

Would you like to play a game? No, not global nuclear warefare I'm afraid, but an old fashioned text adventure game. It is like something from the early 1980s or perhaps it is even older. It starts off, "You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes east. In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off."

In this sort of classic game you type very simple commands into it, such as north to go north, look to look around or look object where object is something nearby. You can pick up objects with a command like get object and you can do things with it, for example, if you find a shovel, you can type dig to dig with it.

This classic adventure isn't some software that you have to install, it's built right in to OS X on the Mac. It's pretty well hidden and you wouldn't know it was there unless you know the secret commnd to access it. Can you solve the mystery of this adventure game? Try it and see!

Go to the Applications folder, open the Utilities folder, and then start Terminal. In the Terminal window, type emacs -batch -l dunnet (see the screen shot above). When you've had enough, type quit and you'll be told your score. Have fun!

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