Source Code To Infocom's Text Adventure Interpreters Now Available 19
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.
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 (Score:2)
And: say boo
Everything else was fun n easy.
Plover (Score:3)
Re: Plover (Score:1)
Re: Say plugh (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
lol, nice!
Code lost already (Score:4, Insightful)
The guy was eaten by a grue.
And then (Score:3)
The guy was eaten by a grue.
And disappeared in a puff of greasy black smoke.
Re: (Score:2)
C=64 Floppy Instructions (Score:2)
Good reads in the source tree.
'This almost never works the first time so do it twice and maybe reboot'.
Nostaligic!
Re:C=64 Floppy Instructions (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got the original Dungeon source code, pre-Infocom, the game that became Zork 1, 2, 3. Written in MDL, a weird lisp variant. Comments are interesting, but also how they tried to do some stuff that directly supported in the language - like a type of object oriented framework for rooms. Later Dungeon was ported to Fortran, and also amazing that this Lisp-like program got shoved into Fortran; though to be fair the Fortran version is utterly incomprehensible.
Also of note, there was "combat" in Dungeon, it's still there even. The "thief" in the maze gets easier or harder based upon your current game score, with a formula to use that seemingly is only used in that one location, which makes me think they were looking at D&D early edition and trying to originally add some RPG with dice rolling elements.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
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++ (Score:2, Troll)
Wow, pure C before it was polluted by C++
Back in the day... (Score:2)
Re: Back in the day... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hundreds of Z-machine games at if-archive.org (Score:5, Informative)
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.