3 ms·

and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various archit

and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various architectures so that the game could be built once and run anywhere. (Write once, run anywhere -- an idea that would later catch on with a certain programming language that is now displaying this text on your browser screen.) Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited. Appreciating the severe limitations it operated within makes it all the more amazing. Another fine example of "scarcity drives innovation." 40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.

magduf 7y ago
>40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games. Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. You might be surprised. Infocom games don't store text as ASCII; they use a more compact format [1] which packs three characters into every two bytes, and allows for "abbreviations" of commonly used text fragments. Obviously it's nothing like a modern compressor, but still surprisingly effective. I tested GZIP and XZ against a sample of 19 vintage Infocom games. GZIP only managed to compress them by 30%; XZ did a little better at 40%, but still nowhere near what you'd expect for text (70-80%). [1]: https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/sect03.html https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/s...
  - magduf 7y ago
    Very interesting, and better than I would have expected (as in, that's a lower compression rate than I would have expected). I wonder how gzip and xz do with Super Mario Bros. and other NES games though.

magduf 7y ago

>40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow. That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only. If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games. Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.

duskwuff 7y ago
> I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. You might be surprised. Infocom games don't store text as ASCII; they use a more compact format [1] which packs three characters into every two bytes, and allows for "abbreviations" of commonly used text fragments. Obviously it's nothing like a modern compressor, but still surprisingly effective. I tested GZIP and XZ against a sample of 19 vintage Infocom games. GZIP only managed to compress them by 30%; XZ did a little better at 40%, but still nowhere near what you'd expect for text (70-80%). [1]: https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/sect03.html https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/s...
- magduf 7y ago
  Very interesting, and better than I would have expected (as in, that's a lower compression rate than I would have expected). I wonder how gzip and xz do with Super Mario Bros. and other NES games though.