
Zork and the Z-Machine: Bringing the Mainframe to 8-Bit Home Computers - petethomas
https://hackaday.com/2019/05/22/zork-and-the-z-machine-bringing-the-mainframe-to-8-bit-home-computers/
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_emacsomancer_
One can also try out the original mainframe/PDP-10 version of Zork, running
the original MDL code, on a modern computer, see:
[https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion-
mdl](https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl) for relevant source for
the MDL interpreter / [https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork-
confusion/](https://babbagefiles.xyz/zork-confusion/) for discussion.

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clucas
> In Adventure, each room has a numeric ID, with an associated description in
> a table. Another table defines its short description. Another table lists
> which rooms lie relative to other rooms using their numeric IDs. This means
> that in order to add a room, one has to modify all of these tables, taking
> care not to cause any issues with those changes.

Our tooling is better now, but this basically describes the ECS model. There
is nothing new under the sun...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)

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cerealbad
text-to-speech synthesis + voice recognition can revive text based adventures
as lightweight audio only games.

the best immersion engine is human imagination. a world in which literary
fiction becomes interactive content, and authors begin to write for their work
to be performed - to be read out loud and be repeatable with hidden narrative
structures - creates an interesting alternative to the current direction the
video game industry is going (total artificial immersion).

imagine setting a game in a real city and having players play through a day,
mixing real physical locations and objects with virtual audio characters and
allowing for the relatively low-tech solution of only engaging the one sense
artificially but all other senses in reality to create a type of spacial-
temporal ambiguity, the inversion of immersion.

would also be great for guided tours, recommending people places to visit, as
a teaching aid and a typical shift away from reading as the primary mechanism
our civilization is geared around which is a specialized skill that requires
years of training and teaches bad habits around attention, severely limiting
memory retention and creating unrealistic freedom when it comes to conveying
information, when in the world things only happen once one way, in the
artificial world of permanent words time stops to flow and the authors intent
can be masked and layered behind tricks and tactics difficult to discern, it
is much harder to lie and distort things in person.

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larrywright
I grew up in the era of the TRS-80 and Apple II. I was also an oddity among my
friends who had computers, because I preferred the text based games from
Infocom over the graphical games. I played a lot of Zork, and Wishbringer, as
well as Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, which was probably my favorite.

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nostalgk
I'm still an oddity among my friends for playing Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, and
various MUDs over the current graphical offerings. Something about those games
and the level of detail afforded to being purely in text, without the
graphical overhead, makes them endlessly entertaining and full of depth to me.

Not to say there aren't some great games out there today that manage both,
like Rimworld for example.

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new4thaccount
Yea, I almost exclusively do text games these days.

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dekhn
I managed to get zork to run on an esp32. well, it got as far as printing the
first room and then crashed.

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purplezooey
Haha that Zork TRS-80 cover art brought me back

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justin66
Stopped reading here, right at the beginning:

> Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time.

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gboudrias
And what's your objection? Zork good Fortnite bad?

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StanislavPetrov
I didn't stop at that sentence, but I can understand the latter sentiment.
Zork was a revolutionary game, Fortnite is a cartoon shooter. Other than both
games being popular there is simply no comparison between the two in my mind.

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MayaPosch
Article author here. I get why people trip over that comparison. Unfortunately
it wasn't added by myself, nor part of the original draft. The comparison is
(somewhat) obviously intended to make it clear that it was a super-popular
game.

That said, I'm glad that people like the rest of the article :)

