Latinorum, by Roberto Ceccarelli

Description: A.D. MCMLXXXIV, somewhere in Italy. It's May and the end of the school year is approaching.  If you don't do well in your last Latin test,  Prof. De Boccis will fail you. De Boccis comes from another city and,  knowing that he may be delayed by public transport,  he leaves the test at school so that  a colleague can start the test immediately. The plan is to get hold of the text and  then translate it with the help of  your classmate Secchioni: he will get a perfect A, while you will insert a few errors  so as not to arouse too much suspicion. 

Author Statement: In 1985, a year after graduating from high school, I came across a program in the Italian magazine MCmicromputer, for the Apple II, that allowed you to create text-based adventures.
Driven by curiosity, I ported it to my Commodore 64 and wrote a short adventure game set in my school, which featured fictionalized versions of some real-life events.
Back then, it wasn't easy to distribute certain things, so the floppy disk sat in a drawer until last summer, when I tried to retrieve SOSYA, the program I had presented for my high school graduation exam (anyone interested can find it on my website).
I thought the story was nice, so I completely rewrote the parser and tweaked the story a bit, but still for the Commodore 64.
And now it’s time to share it with you: remember, this is a story from over 40 years ago that runs on a computer from that era.
As a result, you'll need a physical keyboard to play the online version.

System: Commodore 64
Entered In: Main Festival 
Tags: "English", "Italiano", "SPQR", "back to school", "retrocomputing", "Commodore 64", "80s nostalgia", "two-words parser"
Download: https://www.springthing.net/2025/stories/Latinorum/Latinorum.zip (2.38 MB)
 Additional Links:
  - My Commodore 64: https://strawberryfield.altervista.org/30_anni_casasoft/commodore64.php?lang=en
  - Download d64 image: stories/Latinorum/latinorum.d64

This story was entered in the 2025 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. More info on the festival is available at http://www.springthing.net/
