Infocom’s ingenious code-porting tools for Zork and other games have been found - Ars Technica

( November 21, 2023; Ars Technica )

Description: "The Z-machine allowed porting from mainframes to TRS-80, Apple II, and others."

Most of Infocom's games were written in "Zork Implementation Language," which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine. The Z-Machine could be considered the first real game development engine, so long as nobody fact-checks that statement too hard. Lots of work has been done in open source realms to create modern, and improved, versions of these interpreters for pretty much every device imaginable.

The source code for these Z-Machine implementations (virtual machines, in today's parlance) appeared like a grue from the dark a few days ago in a GitHub repository owned by Andrew Plotkin. Plotkin, a major figure in modern and classic text adventure realms (and lots in between), details what they are and how he found them in a blog post on his site.

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I spent many hours playing Zork on a Commodore 64 in the '70s or '80s. Here's the link to the above-mentioned github repo, and here is the blog post.

(Note: If this works, then a locally compiled copy of SteemJ is now working. Based on the top-2 @social posts, I expect it to work, but I wanted to also try with my account.)


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