Professional Adventure Writer or PAW (sometimes called PAWS for Professional Adventure Writing System) is a program that allows the user to write textual adventure games with graphic illustrations. It was written by Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle and Phil Wade, based on Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill. PAW was published by

Gilsoft Gilsoft was a British developer of video games and related utilities. The company was best known for developing the text adventure authoring tool '' The Quill'' and its successor, '' Professional Adventure Writer''. History Gilsoft was set up by ...

in 1987 and quickly gained a loyal following. PAW improved over The Quill in several ways. In particular, its textual input parser was more sophisticated, meaning inputs were no longer confined to the two-word telegraphic ''verb noun'' (e.g. "GO WEST; TAKE LAMP") style. PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colou ...

. However, unlike their prequel ''The Quill'', the PAW no longer supported other computer systems like the

BBC Micro The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphas ...

or the

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness W ...

. Over 400 games were written using PAW. To ensure that as much text as possible can be used, PAWS compresses the descriptions by replacing the most common letters combinations by tokens, using characters greater than 127 (the ones that, in the Spectrum, are used for storing the BASIC tokens). In 2001, WinPAW was written by Douglas Harter. It could read adventures written in PAW, but ran under MS-Windows and had a few extensions to the original. The adventures made in WinPAW could only be played using the MS Windows runtime. In 2009, InPAWS was released in its first version. It allows you to extract PAW adventures, edit them or create from scratch and write back a database for PAW for either Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum. Thus, it also allows PAW adventures to be ported between the systems.InPAWS
/ref> Graeme Yeandle also released an updated version of the

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initi ...

version of PAW for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few o ...

and called it ''PC Adventure Writer''.

References

External links

*
Graeme Yeandle's Text Adventure Page

The PAW Reservoir by Nacho A. Llorente *deleted by author*
*{{WoS game, id=0006825, name=Professional Adventure Writer
WinPAW
- PAW ported to MS Windows
ngPAWS
- PAW in JavaScript

- compiler/extractor for Gilsoft's PAW 1986 software CP/M software Text adventure game engines Video game development software ZX Spectrum software