Boot To Zork

Seemingly to inflict more suffering upon himself, Matthew Garrett (lord of getting things to boot using EFI) decided that booting directly into Zork would be cool. Quoting his weblog entry: "So, Frotz seemed like the natural choice when this happened. But despite having a set of functionality that makes it look much more like an OS than a boot environment, UEFI doesn't actually expose a standard C library. The EFI Application Development Kit solves this particular design decision. Porting Frotz ended up involving far more fixing up of Frotz bugs that tripped up -Werror than anything else. One note, though - make sure you include DevShell in the list of required packages at build time, otherwise file i/o will mysteriously fail." Grab the code, assuming you have a copy of Zork (or any other Z-machine game, as long as you name it ZORK1.DAT, I think).

Like in the old days.

[cheetah_spottycat]

I think it's only fitting, keeping in mind, that in the old Amiga/Atari days, booting directly into your games was an absolutely normal thing to do - hardware resources were scarce, and the last thing you wanted was sharing RAM and precious CPU cycles with an OS running in the background.

Interactive Fiction is very alive

[dwheeler]

These games are now typically called "Interactive Fiction"; there are LOTS of them, and they are still being developed. It's a small community, but active. Two good post-Infocom games are Bronze (by Emily Short) and Anchorhead (by Michael Gentry).

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction [wikipedia.org]

A gentle intro: http://emshort.wordpress.com/how-to-play/ [wordpress.com]

Re:Like in the old days.

[operagost]

Heck, we had to do this with PCs in the late 80s through the mid 90s before OS/2 and Windows 95. People had DOS boot menus in autoexec.bat so they could choose to boot up with maximum conventional memory, or to emulate EMS in XMS for Lucasarts games. I loved OS/2 because, while the Windows 3.x people had to exit and maybe reboot to play a game, I could fire it up from my desktop for a quick break of X-Wing and quit right back to the paper I was working on. That was amazing back then... unless you had an Amiga. But then, Amigas didn't have memory protection, so you'd better remember to save the paper first.