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AN ANCIENT INSCRIPTION, PROBABLY A PRAYER IN A FORGOTTEN LANGUAGE —


INFOCOM’S INGENIOUS CODE-PORTING TOOLS FOR ZORK AND OTHER GAMES HAVE BEEN FOUND


THE Z-MACHINE ALLOWED PORTING FROM MAINFRAMES TO TRS-80, APPLE II, AND OTHERS.

Kevin Purdy - 11/21/2023, 11:21 AM

Enlarge / Zork running on a Commodore 64 at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin,
Germany.
Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed)

READER COMMENTS

85 with

The source code for many of Infocom's foundational text-parsing adventure games,
including Zork, has been available since 2019. But that code doesn't do anything
for modern computers, nor even computers of the era, when it comes to actually
running the games.

Most of Infocom's games were written in "Zork Implementation Language," which
was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted
on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine. The Z-Machine could be
considered the first real game development engine, so long as nobody fact-checks
that statement too hard. Lots of work has been done in open source realms to
create modern, and improved, versions of these interpreters for pretty much
every device imaginable.

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The source code for these Z-Machine implementations (virtual machines, in
today's parlance) appeared like a grue from the dark a few days ago in a GitHub
repository owned by Andrew Plotkin. Plotkin, a major figure in modern and
classic text adventure realms (and lots in between), details what they are and
how he found them in a blog post on his site.

Midway through a lengthy discussion on an interactive fiction forum about
Infocom interpreters and modern standards for documenting them, a message drops
out of nowhere about a multi-decade mystery: "I have the source of what is
likely most of Infocom’s interpreters. Until you mentioned it, I had no idea it
wasn’t publicly available." Plotkin responds, just over an hour later, that
they're taking it to private chat. Then someone else posted the IBM PC
interpreter source in the fashion of everybody's memory suddenly being jogged.

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As Plotkin notes, the interpreter source code doesn't have a lot of interesting,
personal, or other revealing comments or artifacts. It does contain some
unintentional commentary on what it was like trying to produce commercial
software in the 1980s:

> There's a bunch of internal documentation about creating disks for the various
> platforms. Remember that in the 1980s, floppy disks were pretty incompatible
> between platforms. To write a C64 disk, you had to get the game data and
> interpreter onto a C64 which could then write it to disk. But how did you do
> that? No Wifi, no Ethernet port... Infocom's solution was to run a serial
> cable from their DEC-20 (where all the games were developed) to the C64 (or
> wherever). The serial transfer program is called "TFTP" in most of these
> folders. Do strings like com1:9600,n,8 turn you on? You might be a serial
> port!

Plotkin also notes that he dropped the files on GitHub without announcing it or
making "a big fuss." That's because he's actively negotiating with Infocom's
modern rights-holders to open-source the legendary firm's work. For a while,
that meant Activision, which acquired Infocom in 1986. Now, it means Microsoft,
which acquired Activision in October.

"A lawyer would say, 'Don't keep releasing source code while you're negotiating
with the original rights-holder.' That would be good legal advice," Plotkin
wrote. "I, er, ignored the good-advice part of my brain there."

The Hackaday blog previously dug into the details of the Z-Machine and how it
brought DEC PDP-10 games to TRS-80s and other home computers. You can find out
much more about the Zork Implementation Language, itself a chopped-down version
of the Model Development Language (MDL), in "Learning ZIL," an Infocom
instruction manual for the language posted to the Internet Archive. Its subtitle
is "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Writing Interactive Fiction But
Couldn't Find Anyone Still Working Here to Ask."


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READER COMMENTS

85 with
Kevin Purdy Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering a
variety of technology topics and reviewing products. He started his writing
career as a newspaper reporter, covering business, crime, and other topics. He
has written about technology and computing for more than 15 years.

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