it's 2025 and is there seriously no such thing as a php based z-machine interpreter out there?

MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

In 1984 and 1987, Infocom released "sampler" disks that included short excerpts from 4 Infocom games to attract new players to the world of interactive fiction. The 1984 Sampler had pieces of Zork I, Planetfall, Infidel, and the Witness in addition to a cute well-written IF tutorial by Marc Blank.
#Infocom #RetroGames #RetroGaming

https://www.invisiclues.org/play/sampler84

Es soll ja Menschen geben, die, obwohl sie früher einen #C64 hatten, das Hobby heute nur aus nostalgischen Gründen verfolgen. Das ist ja auch echt ok, aber Leute, ihr verpasst echt was - denn auch heute kommen noch immer ziemlich coole Programme für euren Brotkasten raus und ich wollte mal kurz von Hibernated berichten, das wir hier gleich mal anspielen wollen
Edit: Problem beim Ansehen? Nutze den Link: https://tube.moep.tv/w/wHDaXvdjikVSMjorbf6udu

The Pawn dishes out some blows against Zork, I think! The election poster for Gringo Baconburger seems to take a jab at Infocom‘s earlier offering!
#interactivefiction #magneticscrolls #infocom

[Video, 8m] "The Making of Infocom Text Adventure Games in 1985".

Old BBC short about Infocom and interactive fiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAubRZ-qjw

My next narrative analysis video: Infocom's 1984 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Available now for Patreon supporters, on Tuesday for everyone else.

#Infocom #retrogaming #interactiveFiction

https://www.patreon.com/posts/hitchhikers-to-124933874?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

In the late 1980s, Infocom's Amy Briggs was given a collection of contextless demo images and asked to turn them into an interactive comic book. The result was the Infocomic "Gamma Force in the Pit of a Thousand Screams." Now you can play Gamma Force (and other Infocomics) in your browser at InvisiClues.org.
#Infocom #Infocomics #RetroGaming

https://www.invisiclues.org/infocomics/gf-c64

With this week's update, InvisiClues.org now archives more than 300 historical magazine and newspaper articles about Infocom's games, designers, and history, with more historical articles added frequently.
#Infocom #RetroGaming

https://www.invisiclues.org/library

it is safe to say that 90% of my taste in computer games is thanks to the original abandonware site Home of the Underdogs. every few months i’d make it a point to download one of their Top Dog awarded games, and all of them lived up to it.

in particular, westwood/infocom’s Mines of Titan always interested me. it never quite fit into infocom’s IF catalog, and it predated the much more popular Eye of the Beholder. i always avoided it because it looked like just another dungeon crawler.

as it turns out, Mines of Titan is far closer to Wasteland or Neuromancer than any other game. part text adventure, part rpg, it evokes a surprisingly unique world that easily fits in a philip k dick styled universe.

today, the box arrived after two decades of looking for one. per infocom’s exceptional marketing company, the browsies included in the box are wonderful - official letterheads and employee bulletins from mars corporations.

Zork I was released for home computers in 1981 and it soared to the top of sales charts, where it remained for more than three years! It was Infocom's top-selling product ever, selling more than 400,000 copies (a huge number for the era) and was the "killer app" of its day.
#Infocom #Zork #RetroGaming

https://www.invisiclues.org/zork-i

before Westwood became a household name, it was a development house contracted out by major publishers

one of its many forgotten early titles is the *excellent* Mines of Titan published by Infocom in 1989.

along with Circuit's Edge - built on the same engine - this is a futuristic RPG with a *very* similar interface to interplay's Wasteland and Neuromancer.

the combat is pretty unforgiving in the first few minutes, so i can imagine this irritated a lot of adventure gamers at first.

Someone should create a book version of the Zork trilogy. After all, it’s just text and would be fun as a Choose Your Own Adventure.

]#gamedev ]#writing #infocom

After much testing and code comparison, the new Feb 2025 Release of #Vezza - my #z80 high speed #zmachine is ready! Took way longer than expected to synchronize across all of the code bases, particularly making sure that all optimizations made it across all platforms - TRS-80 model 1, TRS-80 model 3, TRS-80 model 4, the CP/M versions (~18 platforms), the embedded versions (Spectrum tape, TEC-1G), and slowly pushing into the Agon Light version (which has even more updates still in progress). Lots of individual tweaks, and some major rethinks and rewrites have come together to accelerate game play.

The hardest part of rewriting in this update involved rewriting the dictionary search code. I ended up going back to the original jzip interpreter, written in C for Unix waaay back when. Jzip provided much of the logic that went into ZXZVM, which provided the base for #M4ZVM #M3ZVM and #Vezza. Going back to Jzip made sense as Jzip has an even longer history; and is highly tested and stable and still maintained. This research gave me the confidence that the streamlining and changes I was making to such a fundamental part of the game would work, making all inputted dictionary searching more efficient.

To work around how CP/M stores executable files I spent a lot of time re-organising the memory map to make the executable smaller. This involved rearranging where the initialization code was stored inside the increasingly complex layout. Support across multiple versions means I needed to break up variable sized code and strings to sit inside variable sized gaps, while still compiling all the CP/M versions from the same interconnected set of source files. It needed quite a few manual checks to ensure that it all worked.

What this all means is that your favourite #infocom #punyinform and other text adventures will all play on your favourite z80 #retrocomputing platforms even faster than before!

More details in the devlog and downloads can be found at:
#TRS80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/m4zvm
#CPM #CPM80 versions https://sijnstra.itch.io/vezza

#Playing ZORK on End of The Line BBS:
https://endofthelinebbs.com/

You can play a lot of Infocom games there, & save your progression.

I'm taking a lot of notes. Playing in a dark place only lightened by some diode lights. The cat sleeps in a cardboard box nearby with all 4 irons in the air. What a scene! :0)

#zork #infocom #adventure #text #games #gaming #retrogaming #retrocomputing
#BBS #BBSing #ssh #EndOfTheLineBBS #bulletinboards #textmode #ANSI #ASCII #terminal #retrocomputing #oldschool

For all of you #TEC1G adventure game players looking for something bigger, better and more... historical, I've beefed up my #vezza #infocom interpreter to use the extra 16K available in EXPAND, which sits behind the other 16K from 0x8000-0xBFFF. This means that one of the smallest #z-machine ports of Scott Adams 1978 classic game #Adventureland is now playable on a TEC-1G (with keyboard and GLCD). With the extra RAM being used, it makes the loading a little more involved as it needs to be loaded in two parts, switching the EXPAND ram in to load part 2, then back to loading the main game before you can play. Download the components here, along with more description and detailed instructions: https://gitlab.com/sijnstra1/e-vezza/-/tree/main/TEC-1G

I FOUND IT.
IT HAS THE PENCIL.
IT DIDN'T COST A FORTUNE.
IT'S IN GREAT CONDITION.

OH GODS.

We're going to be streaming Part 3 of Infocom's Planetfall at 20:00 GMT on the Atari ST. Real hardware, real adventure, real robots, real FRUSTRATION!

https://www.twitch.tv/betsyandsamantha