3 ms·
Would be great if there were files available for the Z-machine that played out the original Edward Packard CYOA series, like Through The Black Hole, e.g.
by cogburnd02 5y ago
Would be great if there were files available for the Z-machine that played out the original Edward Packard CYOA series, like Through The Black Hole, e.g.
- anthk 5y agoThose could be implemented trivially even with raw Inform6. Or any language. Even HTML, too.
- dfabulich 5y agoThey're not available for sale, but you can find them all as clickable epubs. (Any device that can run a Z-machine can run an epub reader just as easily.)
- mrob 5y agoAny modern device will run both, but Infocom's Z-machine ran on old 8-bit home computers. Even if you ignore EPUB's image support (which includes the complicated SVG format), EPUB is zipped XHTML+CSS. I'd be very surprised if you could fit a parser and renderer for all that in the limited RAM they had available.
- anthk 5y agoV3 games ran on 8 bit computers, but v5 games (most of modern ones) only run well under a 16 bit one. As for epubs, netbsd runs on Amiga and Classic Mac, and if lynx and unzip work, so do epub files with a crappy script. It's 2020 and an RPI or an ESP32 are dirt cheap, and you can get a 486 machine even for free.
- cogburnd02 5y agoI suppose an epub would be pretty easy to convert (on a modern machine) into something like ZIL for ZILF. Good thinking.