Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers

https://hackaday.com/2019/05/22/zork-and-the-z-machine-bringing-the-mainframe-to-8-bit-home-computers/

by petethomas • 7 years ago

106 17 7 years ago

One can also try out the original mainframe/PDP-10 version of Zork, running the original MDL code, on a modern computer, see: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl for relevant source for the MDL interpreter / https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork-confusion/ for discussion.

justin66• 7 years ago

Stopped reading here, right at the beginning:

Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time.

mattherman• 7 years ago

That's unfortunate. You missed out on an interesting article.

gboudrias• 7 years ago

And what's your objection? Zork good Fortnite bad?

0xdeadbeefbabe• 7 years ago

Not the OP, but Zork was easy to put down and pick up later, and it wasn't multiplayer. It's the comparison that ignores something really interesting.

StanislavPetrov• 7 years ago

I didn't stop at that sentence, but I can understand the latter sentiment. Zork was a revolutionary game, Fortnite is a cartoon shooter. Other than both games being popular there is simply no comparison between the two in my mind.

larrywright2• 7 years ago

I grew up in the era of the TRS-80 and Apple II. I was also an oddity among my friends who had computers, because I preferred the text based games from Infocom over the graphical games. I played a lot of Zork, and Wishbringer, as well as Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, which was probably my favorite.

nostalgk• 7 years ago

I'm still an oddity among my friends for playing Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, and various MUDs over the current graphical offerings. Something about those games and the level of detail afforded to being purely in text, without the graphical overhead, makes them endlessly entertaining and full of depth to me.

Not to say there aren't some great games out there today that manage both, like Rimworld for example.

new4thaccount• 7 years ago

Yea, I almost exclusively do text games these days.

sneakernets• 7 years ago

Zork and related games were so good at making your imagination create scenery that I caught myself looking for screenshots of a game that was actually a text adventure.

larrywright2• 7 years ago

I was an avid reader as well, more so than most friends. I wonder if those two are related.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

Haha that Zork TRS-80 cover art brought me back

dekhn• 7 years ago

I managed to get zork to run on an esp32. well, it got as far as printing the first room and then crashed.

clucas• 7 years ago

In Adventure, each room has a numeric ID, with an associated description in a table. Another table defines its short description. Another table lists which rooms lie relative to other rooms using their numeric IDs. This means that in order to add a room, one has to modify all of these tables, taking care not to cause any issues with those changes.

Our tooling is better now, but this basically describes the ECS model. There is nothing new under the sun...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system

cerealbad• 7 years ago

text-to-speech synthesis + voice recognition can revive text based adventures as lightweight audio only games.

the best immersion engine is human imagination. a world in which literary fiction becomes interactive content, and authors begin to write for their work to be performed - to be read out loud and be repeatable with hidden narrative structures - creates an interesting alternative to the current direction the video game industry is going (total artificial immersion).

imagine setting a game in a real city and having players play through a day, mixing real physical locations and objects with virtual audio characters and allowing for the relatively low-tech solution of only engaging the one sense artificially but all other senses in reality to create a type of spacial-temporal ambiguity, the inversion of immersion.

would also be great for guided tours, recommending people places to visit, as a teaching aid and a typical shift away from reading as the primary mechanism our civilization is geared around which is a specialized skill that requires years of training and teaches bad habits around attention, severely limiting memory retention and creating unrealistic freedom when it comes to conveying information, when in the world things only happen once one way, in the artificial world of permanent words time stops to flow and the authors intent can be masked and layered behind tricks and tactics difficult to discern, it is much harder to lie and distort things in person.

Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers

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