Former Loki Developer Jerryrigs a Multiplayer Zork, Available Via Telnet (icculus.org) 53
Programmer Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a former employee at Loki Software, one of the first companies to port videogames from Microsoft Windows to Linux, according to his Wikipedia page. He's still hosting many Loki software projects at icculus.org, "as well as several new projects created by himself and others."
He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement: I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game!
You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.
A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!
He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement: I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game!
You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.
A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!
What's Zork? (Score:1, Troll)
I don't remember this one.. what's Zork anyway?
Re:What's Zork? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't remember this one.. what's Zork anyway?
The creators of the first digital currency, the zorkmid.
Re: (Score:3)
Well it's the second text adventure, and far far bigger than the original Adventure. It was never "Zork 1" until it was ported off of mainframes onto tiny 64k micros and turned into a commercial product. Before then it was just Zork.
Re:What's Zork? (Score:5, Informative)
Zork? It's the great underground empire!
It was a very popular old computer game. I still have my copy for the C64 along with the what-do-I-do-now books [amazon.com] set in the Zork universe.
Hell, I even have the included map framed in my office at home.
My children will play it when they're a bit older. I have a friend who has played it to completion with his children on an old amber terminal. How great is that?
Zork is very well-loved. I highly recommend it.
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It's one of the first games [playclassic.games] which could parse fairly complex English commands [ifwiki.org]. You didn't have to learn which keys did what, or what the command words were. You could type regular English into it, and it would usually understand it.
Re:What's Zork? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't remember this one.. what's Zork anyway?
Never mind that. What's Telnet? :-)
MUD? (Score:4, Informative)
So, it's a Zork themed MUD?
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No. More like a MUD themed Zork.
Re: (Score:2)
It's more than that.
Years ago, an unofficial version of Zork was leaked/spread as Dungeon. The original MUD was literally a "Multi-User Dungeon." More details: https://www.filfre.net/2017/12/games-on-the-net-before-the-web-part-2-mud/ [filfre.net]
History is simply repeating itself.
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This one is actually Infocom's Zork I Release 88. They're infringing Activision's copyright.
The game banner identifies the version, and it contains the bug [microheaven.com] that crashes the Z-Machine if you type EAT RAFT while you're in the raft.
Re: (Score:2)
...that crashes the Z-Machine if you type EAT RAFT while you're in the raft.
I just crashed it by typing, "go house" while in the initial empty field in a solo game.
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Infocom's games contained a lot of the Vile Zero Errors From Hell. Any interpreter used to run them needs to be more robust than that.
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Ohh Millennial/Zillennia reinvents the MUD Film at 11
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Zork is a computer rpg from ... (Score:2)
... the dawn of personal home microcomputers, aka "the 80ies". It's completely text based and had to thus woo its users with others things than graphical effects. Zork is known for its witty Humor and it's considered an computer rpg classic.
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Can you hear me now? (Score:4, Informative)
... at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.
Sound card. [whence.com]
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Language, language ... (Score:3)
Using finger to push glasses up on nose:
The description should probably say "jury rigs" meaning made with available items, as versus "jerry rigs" meaning shoddily constructed.
https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com] ... but hey, maybe it's both.
Re: (Score:2)
If one is using "jerry rigs" then they're also supposedly making a slur against Germans.
Apparently not. Exact origin is unknown but predates usage of "jerry" for German soldiers. "Jerry rigs" goes back to the early 1800s (maybe from Manchester?) whilst the slang for a German soldier originated in WWI although again origin stories vary.
Telnet? That'll sort the true nerds from the geeks (Score:3)
Windows doesnt enable telnet by default any more and MacOS doesnt even ship with it (and the one brew installs is badly broken) so itll be a struggle for non *nix users.
Re: Telnet? That'll sort the true nerds from the g (Score:1)
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My MacOS always had Telnet.
But I'm nit running the latest version.
Or do you mean a telnetd? Never tried it, I use SSH.
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MacOS has 'nc', which works in place of 'telnet' just fine. And the one brew installs isn't broken enough to not work here.
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The one brew installed for me crashes with an Illegal instruction error when it connects to a telnet server which is a bit of a problem. Works ok when connecting to services that don't require negotiation. Perhaps its not been updated for Big Sur.
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Windows doesnt enable telnet by default any more and MacOS doesnt even ship with it (and the one brew installs is badly broken) so itll be a struggle for non *nix users.
Frankly, if you can't install software, you have no business attempting to use this.
Adventure? (Score:2)
Wasn't Zork lifted from Adventure?
Back in 1981, I got a 9-track from a friend with RT-11 that booted into Adventure.
I ran it on a PDP-11/23 from work that was running v7 at the time.
I recall tha it had most of the Zork-ishness.
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Yes. Adventure couldn't scale to the limited memory and disk space of the old 6502 era, so Infocom (who included some of Adventure's original authors) split it up and reorganized it to the 3 games eventually released, doing a complete rewrite to a new language and engine to handle it.
I was looking at Adventure on a Vax/VMS system in college in '88.
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AGH. no, not Adventure.
As noted above, the original game was called Dungeon, and it was ported from ITS to a more generic Fortran IV codebase in '78 which became the version passed around on the PDP-11's and later Unix and VMS systems.
Re:Adventure? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on your definition of "lifted".
Adventure started as a text game, a model of Colossal Cave (a real cave in the real world). It was heavily extended and became a game. It was written in FORTRAN. The command parser was quite simple.
Zork was an independent development at the MIT-AI lab. It was ARGUABLY an early experiment in computational linguistics, a question of "How smart a parser for English could you make?". It was written in MDL, a language distantly related to LISP. There was an INCOMPLETE translation to FORTRAN, that was distributed by DECUS as "Dungeon". The command parser was VERY complex, and arguably was Zork's real contribution to the state of the art and science. There were a few papers published about it. It inspired a lot of other work. The original MDL source code still exists and is easy to find and download. I *THINK* there are MDL language processors available that allow the code to be compiled and run.
"HAUNT", a haunted house game, was one of them. What made Haunt interesting was that it was written in OPS83 (an early production system language, that was used for rule-base expert system development). Partial source code exists, as part of a port to OPS5 (a later system). The complete source code MAY still exist, on a magnetic tape somewhere that may or may not be readable today. Tapes deteriorate if not maintained carefully. Executables that run on PDP-10 emulators do still exist.
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Zork was developed independently at MIT LCS (the Dynamic Modeling group, specifically), definitely *not* the same as the MIT AI lab, though they were in the same building. It was certainly inspired by Adventure / Colossal Cave, which swept the ARPANet in early 1977; Zork was the usual hyper-competitive MIT response, "we can do better than *that*."
Muddle was not a particularly distant cousin of Lisp; it anticipated quite a few things that later showed up in Common Lisp.
The FORTRAN version was complete as of
I played Adventure on a dot matrix (Score:2)
terminal in the early 80's, at high school in Tasmania. Xyzzy.
Then when I went to do my HSC I played Zork on a vdu terminal and never finished it.
Had a few stabs at it over the years. Might have to finish it before I die.
Good times.
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An acquaintance of mine wanted to impress me one night, so he showed me Adventure on a TI 990 at his small business.
He sat me down, started it up, and handed me the keyboard, expecting the usual newbie fumbling around.
Within single-digit minutes, I had us in areas that he had NEVER seen before, and I wasn't bothering to map or keep notes. I had about half of the cave memorized, including all the early puzzles.
Memories...
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terminal in the early 80's, at high school in Tasmania. Xyzzy.
My high school (in a township outside Philadelphia) had a few Teletype Model 33 [wikipedia.org] terminals (with punched tape device) connected via an acoustic coupler [wikipedia.org] (one terminal at a time) to a remote dial-up system. Ah... 1979, those were the days.
Never played any games on those though.
Re: I played Adventure on a dot matrix (Score:1)
My math teacher (who was in charge of our terminal) would freak the fuck out at the amount of paper I was using and my gaming privileges ended up being heavily curtailed.
The next year we got some horrible brown/amber screen vdu and I was back to gaming playing big time.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh ?
Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux (Score:3, Informative)
This guy was one of the minds behind the port of Unreal Tournament 2004 to Linux... flawlessly executed, including a x64 version; one of my favorite games ever. Live long and prosper, Mr. Gordon.
Look at 2ine (OS/2 interpreter) (Score:3)
zorkmid (Score:2)
I still have my Zorkmid feelie from the game. it must be like 30 to 35 years old.
Either that or 2021AD - 699GUE = 1322 years old.
Has anyone won the 3rd game without hints?
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A maze of twisty passages, all alike. (Score:2)
We had fun with these games. My fave classic infocom title was however Planetfall with its lovable robot Floyd.
There was a rather nice graphical adventure follow up to Zork in the 1990s âoeReturn To Zorkâ, one of the first adventures taking advantage of the CD Rom medium by offering a nice soundtrack and video fragments. It had an annoying feature - you can do something wrong
Re: A maze of twisty passages, all alike. (Score:2)
A favourite of mine was the Lovecraftian Anchorhead, worth trying.
cue the https-only tards (Score:2)
Someone could hijack your Zork game!
Someone could snoop your Zork username and playing strategies!
Someone could see that you're playing Zork!
Like that tard around here who said browser shouldn't let me access my http only temperature/humidity device because a terrorist with finger on detonator could snoop my traffic and see body warmth when people were in the office. Nevermind said terrorist could just do web fetch from device himself, nevermind the number of cars in the parking lot will tell you when peop
One other criticism while we're at it . . . (Score:2)
https://www.dictionary.com/e/j... [dictionary.com]
Interesting (Score:1)
Almost good to go (Score:2)
Ah, Zork I (Score:2)
I had a TRS-80 Model I back in the day, and had to do quite a bit to get Zork I working. First I had the original Personal Software version, but the disk stopped working after a few days. I later got the Model III version and was able to patch that interpreter to work with the TRSDOS 2.7 that came with Radio Shack's double-density adapter. Then later I wrote an interpreter for the CoCo (about 6 months before there was an official CoCo version) and tested it by playing the entire game in one sitting before I