Beyond Zork | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Zork

filfre.net

80 pointsjsnell9 comments

Funny, I've been working on a little fun side project to embed a Z-Machine inside a Skype For Business chat bot.

Limited as interactive fiction is as a medium, its really impressive how immersive an experience can be created with technology as simple as plain ASCII text. You don't need photorealistic, PBR graphics to make a fun, engaging game.

The Z-Machine itself is a pretty remarkable piece of technology, especially given the very limited capabilities of the PCs it was implemented for. Reading the spec[1] has been very interesting.

[1] http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index....

Oh, yes, very immersive. I was lucky to play the original Zork, and after a necessarily late night session upon returning to the "real world" I would want to e.g. throw file at printer ^_^.

In the late 80's there was a company selling a database with a front end that reminded me quite a bit of an Infocom game. I think the database was named something really generic (Q&A).

Cornerstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_(software) was the database Infocom released. Is that what you're thinking of?

It could also have been the first versions of Progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Software

It was 't from Infocom (thanks for that link). I just remember it weirded me out and it had a really generic name.

Way back when I ported a C compiler for the Z-machine:

http://cowlark.com/vbcc-z-compiler

It was hacky as hell, and unfortunately I used a compiler frontend with a non-free license which makes it nigh undistributable, but actually worked. I didn't quite get floating point working.

I think the Z-machine internal architecture can best be described as 'interestingly insane'. Some of the hacks needed to make large games work are very educational. For my purposes, the non-memory-mapped stack was particularly... exciting (and very annoying). Another description is, alas, 'almost impossible to find a non-buggy assembler for'.

Highly recommended if you have the kind of twisted mind that likes to do impossible things with 8-bit microcomputers.

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+1 for any link from HN to an article that mentions Wizardry!

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