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

Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

 with graphic illustrations. It was written by Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle and Phil Wade, based on Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill

The Quill

The Quill is a program to write home computer adventure games. Written by Graeme Yeandle, it was published on the ZX Spectrum by Gilsoft in December 1983...

. PAW was published by Gilsoft

Gilsoft

Gilsoft was a British producer and publisher of video games and related utilities. They are perhaps most known for The Quill and the later Professional Adventure Writer....

 in 1986 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 NPC

Non-player character

A non-player character , sometimes known as a non-person character or non-playable character, in a game is any fictional character not controlled by a player. In electronic games, this usually means a character controlled by the computer through artificial intelligence...

s, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum

ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...

.

Later a program called 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 it's 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. It thus also allows PAW adventures to be ported between the systems.http://inpaws.speccy.org/indexEng.html

Graeme Yeandle also released an updated version of the CP/M

CP/M

CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

 version of PAW for MS-DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

and called it PC Adventure Writer.

External links

• Graeme Yeandle's Text Adventure Page
• The PAW Reservoir by Nacho A. Llorente.
• WinPAW
• InPAWS - compiler/extractor for Gilsoft's PAW