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Zork: The Great Inner Workings. Exploring the source code and game
- anthk 5y agoI always preferred the Dungeon versions on Inform6 and the ones in C. ZDungeon runs everywhere and it's almost a full rendition of Zork with some changes here and there. If you want something to target the ZMachine, you should try Inform6. Any 16 bit computer since ~1987 will run z5-z8 games. If you need to run the game well on 8 bit computers, check Puny Inform, which uses a more limited VM (the old v3 widely used from Infocom), but the stories will be good enough.
- low_tech_love 5y agoI’d love to read this if it was actually open to the public!
- WorldMaker 5y agoThis article is interesting as it seems "the long way around": the Z-Machine is rather well documented, and already has VMs for the web [1] and going to the ZIL source to build a port of the ZIL itself rather than to interpret the Z-Machine binary is cool, I suppose, but ignores decades of insights into the Z-Machine. While I'm being a downer, also need to point out that while the Internet Archive has archived the ZIL source code the Zork games are still under copyright and owned by Activision Blizzard (soon/now Microsoft). Using Zork itself as a deployment artifact is a possible way to get sued even if you think the game "abandonware". [1] The best known/maintained is Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment
- anthk 5y agoI think Activision released the whole trilogy for free. Still, you can play Dungeon, which is pretty much the same. ZDungeon is the game for the Z-Machine, so it's like the Ur-concept for Zork and the Z-machine in a full pack.