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).

Re:Text based adventure as a boot option?

[mendax]

I agree. The text-based adventure games are much more fun. The cyberspace equivalent of the Theater of the Mind.

I loved the Fortran-based MIT Adventure. I still have the source code of the version ported to Control Data Cyber mainframes that was floating around the lower-tier (not UC) California state universities, all of whom had Cybers, in the 1980's. I'll probably port it to C one of these days for shits and giggles one of these days so I can relive my undergrad days a bit.