Mr_Flibble

I've dug up a few Windows shareware versions of Exile and Exile II, here you go: Exile: Escape from the Pit v1.0.1 (Jun 11, 1995): exile101.zip v1.0.3 (Jul 14, 1995): EXL103.ZIP v1.1 (Oct 20, 1995): exile11.zip v1.1 (Nov 7, 1995): exl11.zip v1.1.1 (Jan 17, 1996): EXILE111.ZIP v1.1.2 (Jul 7, 1996): EXL112.ZIP Exile II: Crystal Souls v1.0 (Mar 20, 1996): EXIL2V10.ZIP v1.0.2 (Apr 25, 1996): EXL2V102.ZIP v1.0.3 (Jul 3, 1996): EXL2V103.ZIP

I know that the game was first developed for Mac and then ported to Windows, however the newsgroup messages I found clearly concern the Windows versions, not the Mac ones. Also, the archives I have found show no apparent signs of tampering, except for an occasional archive comment that was added to advertise a shareware CD or a BBS (such as The Pier CDs and Cream of the Crop). It's true that I do not know if VENDINFO.DIZ files were made by Jeff Vogel or not. He mentions in one of the posts that he updated the documentation in accord with ASP standards, and using VENDINFO.DIZ files might have been one of the requirements. The Windows version 2.0 is the first to use the new graphics, and I think it was synchronized with the Mac update to v2.0. Versions 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 still use the old graphics set, and v1.0.3 has the old interface. The VENDINFO.DIZ file in v1.0.3 also has this interesting comment:

Until recently I did not realise that the first two games went through some very serious graphical changes after the initial release. I started digging for old versions and found quite a few old shareware packages of Exile: Escape from the Pit. However, I'm a bit confused about the chronology and release dates of those games. Here's the versions that I found (mostly at cd.textfiles.com): v1.0.1: exile101.zip v1.0.3: EXL103.ZIP v1.1: exile11.zip (October 20, 1995) v1.1: exl11.zip (November 7, 1995) v1.1.1: EXILE111.ZIP v1.1.2: EXL112.ZIP I've also found (through Google Groups) copies of comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg newsgroup posts made by Jeff Vogel that announce the release of v1.0.1, v1.0.2, v1.0.3 and v1.1 for Windows. Some of the shareware packages include a file called VENDINFO.DIZ which contains detailed information about the game, such as the release date of the current version and reasons for update. And here's where the tricky part comes in: the dates in VENDINFO.DIZ (and date stamps on the files where VENDINFO.DIZ is not included) are way off compared to the newsgroup announcements, especially for versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2 and 1.0.3. The news about the upload of v1.0.1 was posted on August 11, 1995, however the date stamps on the files in the v1.0.1 shareware package are from June 11, 1995. For v1.0.3, the announcement was apparently made on September 25, 1995, yet the VENDINFO.DIZ indicates July 14, 1995 as the version date instead. I would assume that the dates on the files themselves are correct, but then it means that no reliable date for v1.0.2, for which a shareware package seems to be unavailable. Another quite confusing thing is that in the announcements, the shareware archives' filenames always follow the pattern of exile1xx.zip. Conversely, inside VENDINFO.DIZ the packages are universally called EXL1xx. The third thing I was wondering about is that the version numbers as reported in each version are three digits separated by full stops (1.x.x), however VENDINFO.DIZ theres a single digit separated by a full stop from a two-digit number (1.xx). I would assume that since VENDINFO.DIZ files were apparently generated by the use of some programme and not manually, perhaps the limitations of that programme prevented from correctly giving both the version numbers and the file names, however I'd like to have this confirmed. Any clarification on these questions will be deeply appreciated.