Source Code To Infocom's Text Adventure Interpreters Now Available

Slashdot reader Mononymous writes: Back in 2019, digital archivist Jason Scott released the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures. Now the other piece of the puzzle is available: the source code (mostly in assembly, with some C and Pascal) to their microcomputer interpreters.

Infocom, publisher of the best-selling Zork series, ported their text adventures to most of the diverse microcomputer platforms of the 1980s by using an early virtual machine, known as the Z-machine or ZIP. This enabled them to sell games simultaneously for everything from the TI-99/4A to the Commodore 128. Hobbyists reverse-engineered the technology in the 1990s to create modern implementations, but now the original source code can be studied directly.

Say plugh

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

And: say boo

Everything else was fun n easy.

Plover

[techno-vampire]

Personally, my favorite was the implausible process you needed to go through in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in order to get a bablefish. A masterful combination of Douglas Adams and Rube Goldberg.

Re: Plover

[Cumstien]

Spoiler alert: use your towel to block the drain.

Re: Say plugh

[Plugh]

Every time I log in

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

lol, nice!

Code lost already

[nospam007]

The guy was eaten by a grue.

And then

[Okian Warrior]

The guy was eaten by a grue.

And disappeared in a puff of greasy black smoke.

Re:

[Motleypuss]

While being trapped in a maze of twisty little passages, all of which are alike.

C=64 Floppy Instructions

[bill_mcgonigle]

Good reads in the source tree.

'This almost never works the first time so do it twice and maybe reboot'.

Nostaligic!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[martin-boundary]

Formulas are great when you don't have a lot of memory to waste for data, which was the rule in those days. Another good example was Elite, which gave you lots of alien planets to fly to. All the planet characteristics were randomly generated on demand. Also: fractal terrain generators for flight sims.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

The better term regarding Elite is "procedural" generated on demand.
As it was not random at all. The planets always had the same position and characteristics.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

source [alioth.net]

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

It is nevertheless not random, but procedural.
Like you, the maintainer of that site does not know the difference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Pure C before it was polluted by C++

[Proudrooster]

Wow, pure C before it was polluted by C++

Back in the day...

[Hans Lehmann]

Back in the day I reverse engineered the Zork .com file, mostly just because I couldn't figure out the last few moves of the game, They did some simple compression of the text responses, as I recall, so that you couldn't just open the file with a hex editor and retrieve all of the strings. I wasted far too many valuable hours on that endeavor.

Re: Back in the day...

[sethmeisterg]

But you learned stuff in the process so it wasn't a total waste.

Hundreds of Z-machine games at if-archive.org

[kriston]

There are hundreds of free Z-machine interactive fiction games over at https://www.ifarchive.org/ [ifarchive.org]. They run a contest every year with new submissions at https://ifcomp.org/ [ifcomp.org].

You can get a taste of them in your browser over at my web site https:///kriston.net/games/ [kriston.net].

I'm using the excellent Parchment JavaScript Z-machine interpreter [github.com] and it will be interesting to see what bugs and features will be added to these reverse-engineered Z-machine engines.