Building a Z-Machine in the worst possible language – Whitebeard's Realm | Hacker News Reader

Building a Z-Machine in the worst possible language – Whitebeard's Realm

whitebeard.blog

29 pointstechbelly7 comments

Portability between different computers is only a secondary reason for the Z-machine. The most important reason is code size, making the largest possible game that can fit on a floppy disk.

See the article “How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine” by Marc S. Blank and S. W. Galley, in the July 1980 issue of Creative Computing. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1980-07/page/n...

Is not the worst one, Zmachine.ps it's written in PostScript.

On Games, get Tristam Island and Calypso in the Z3 versions.

Although its core is low level, PostScript is a pretty good language by some metrics; it's often been claimed to be a (supposedly accidental) dialect of Forth with some powerful features bolted on.

What makes Zmachine.ps so bad? Certain programming issues, or are you going off a general feel?

This is awesome. Presumably if this worked in Elm, Clojure would work too. There’s a very cool niche community around these games for those who don’t know. Vespers was one of the best games I ever played. Check out ifdb for games. There are mobile players available too.

IFDB (Interactive Fiction Database): https://ifdb.org/

Vespers on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6dj2vguyiagrhvc2

Cool.

Due to the UK Online Safety Act, all games on the IF Archive are currently unavailable to users in the United Kingdom.

Uncool. Sigh

Over Gopher:

gopher://gopher.661.org/1/if-archive

Proxy:

http://portal.mozz.us

The previous URL over the proxy:

https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.661.org/1/if-archive

ZMachine games:

https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/mercury.661.org/1/if-archive/g...

Tristam Island and Calypso (and All Things Devour, plus Spiritwrak) can be fetched over git/github, they are libre games, so no issues there.

I can post links to the compiled ZMachine binaries if you want.

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