New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance Is Nigh

> I'd love to find a group of people to play IF with some day as a group activity. I was too young during its popular days. Now it is too niche for me to convince any friends or co-workers to give it a go.

I've been joking that my Twitch channel is an exercise in finding extremes that likely no one would actually watch. It mostly only has stuff streamed to it, for instance, because Sea of Thieves gives some small in-game rewards for streaming, and I like finding a lot of the less exciting parts of SoT to stream (including jokes about some of it being Pirate ASMArrr for how quiet and soft I play it sometimes).

Anyway, long rambling prologue to: now I really want to try Twitch streaming some text adventures. This sounds like a very appropriate use of the wonders of modern game video streaming technology, both sarcastically in the sense of my above finding silly things to stream for streaming's sake, and not at all facetiously in that if it did somehow attract an audience magically or mysteriously that sounds like an amazing way to play such games.

Emily Short https://emshort.blog/my-work/

> Curses is super long.

It's also a very "old school" interactive fiction game design -- heavily item-driven puzzles, some of which can be made unsolveable by mistake, and at least one maze. Even the author has retrospectively described it as being "by any reasonable standard too hard".

> Emily Short

... who, incidentally, is married to Graham Nelson.

MacFrotz is not a viable option. Its last release was in 2004, it's only available as a PowerPC application, and there is no source available. (I suspect it was originally built to run on Classic Mac OS.)

Building frotz from source should work fine, though.

The original frotz is installable with homebrew on macOS

I thought of to have a LLVM backend to target Glulx. Some things are done easily enough; the ! operator of C corresponds to "ushiftr 1,$,$" in Glulx (this is using Glasm syntax). Calling conventions are simple. The Glk functions can be converted directly to Glulx code, with a few exceptions; the Glk type "S" means a different thing in C and in Glulx, although for most of them you can instead use ones that take an array and length, making the function to calculate the length before calling Glk. The C strlen() function becomes "linearsearch 0,1,$,1,-1,0,4,$" in Glulx.

However, one thing with both Z-machine and Glulx is that there is no alloca(). However, you might be able to emulate it with a "shadow stack", I thought. (If programming in assembly language, this is not a problem since you can take advantage of those specific virtual machines instead.)

Also, does LLVM support targeting 16-bit computers so well? (I don't know how to write a LLVM backend.)

For Z-machine, one thing I thought might work better to compile into a Z-machine code might be a variant of BASIC instead.

But when programming in Z-machine or Glulx, I just use assembly language; you can then run those programs on other computers anyways, so it wouldn't be as much problem. (Many of the tricks in "Tricky Document" assume the use of assembly language, although some could be implemented by optimizers.)

From there it's only a short hop to compiling to WASM, too.