Technical Tidbits
The Interchoice game engine and related components were written in compiled BASIC and 6502 assembly language and run under ProDOS. The 800K version may be copied to hard drives and played from there (just be sure to run RUNTIME.SYSTEM and not). Please note: Interchoice makes use of the /RAM volume for caching of room and response data.
The engine uses a lightweight dictionary/token compression routine to reduce the amount of space consumed on disk while making best efforts to maintain performance where practical.
In situations where an individual story file falls within the size range of >512 and <1024 bytes, the file writer will split the content across two ProDOS files sized at 1 block each (rather than losing a third block for an index, as required by sapling files.) This reduces the disk space requirements on smaller 143K floppies, allowing for more content without having to spin more complex solutions (e.g. 256K blocks, custom operating systems, etc... sometimes simpler is better)!
In terms of the game itself, Sparkstone contains 19000+ words, 106 named locations, 260 story files, 419 different choice/option prompts, and 16 different endings all packed into two 143K floppies! You might call it a labor of love!
We hope you'll enjoy playing the game as much as we had in crafting it!