Upping The Story-Telling Game With Dialog And The Å-Machine

September 16, 2019 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

During the decades since Infocom released their interactive story game Zork to world-wide acclaim for microcomputers, the genre of interactive fiction (IF) is still immensely popular, with a surprising number of modern IF works targeting Infocom’s original Z-Machine runtime for 8-bit micocomputers. We’ve seen a number of improved runtimes and languages for the platform over the years, with [Linus Åkesson]’s Dialog language a newcomer.

Covering the technical details about the language in this thread at IntFiction, the interesting aspect about this language is that while it has a compiler that compiles it to Z-code for the Z-Machine, [Linus] has also implemented a new runtime, called the ‘Å-Machine‘, since ‘Å’ follows ‘Z’ in the alphabet (if you’re Swedish, that is). This runtime should allow for larger stories and other features that make better use of more resources, while still allowing smaller stories to work on old hardware. Unfortunately the only Å-Machine implementation at this point is written in JavaScript, which is not known to work particularly well on Commodore 64 or even Amiga 500 systems.

As for Dialog itself, its documentation provides a detailed overview of the language’s capabilities, which claims to be inspired by both Inform 7 and Prolog. Its goals are to be easy to follow, with a minimal number of language concepts, and high performance. As the documentation notes, many Z-Machine based stories exist today that are unplayable on vintage hardware due to lack of optimization.

We covered Zork and the Z-Machine a while ago in some detail. We think it’s great to see that there’s still so much interest in the platform. Maybe someone will write an Å-Machine implementation for a Commodore or MSX system one of these days to see how it compares to Infocom’s Z-Machine. Here’s to another few decades of the Zork-legacy.

Zork And The Z-Machine: Bringing The Mainframe To 8-bit Home Computers

May 22, 2019 by Maya Posch 30 Comments

Computer games have been around about as long as computers have. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. But Zork is more than that. For portability and size reasons, Zork itself is written in Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), makes heavy use of the brand-new concept of object-oriented programming, and runs on a virtual machine. All this back in 1979. They used every trick in the book to pack as much of the Underground Empire into computers that had only 32 kB of RAM. But more even more than a technological tour de force, Zork is an unmissable milestone in the history of computer gaming. But it didn’t spring up out of nowhere.

The computer revolution had just taken a fierce hold during the second World War, and showed no sign of subsiding during the 1950s and 1960s. More affordable computer systems were becoming available for purchase by businesses as well as universities. MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) was fortunate to have ties to ARPA, which gave MIT’s LCS and AI labs (formerly part of Project MAC) access to considerable computing resources, mostly in the form of DEC PDP systems.

The result: students at the MIT Dynamic Modeling Group (part of LCS) having access to a PDP-10 KA10 mainframe — heavy iron at the time. Though this PDP-10 was the original 1968 model with discrete transistor Flip Chip modules and wire-wrapping, it had been heavily modified, adding virtual memory and paging support to expand the original 1,152 kB of core memory. Running the MIT-developed Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) OS, it was a highly capable multi-user system.

Naturally, it got mostly used for playing games.
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Put An ItsyBitsy Zork In Your Pocket

November 8, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

Before computer games had all these fancy graphics, text based games were a very popular genre. Rather than move a character on the screen, you’d type out commands for your player in sentence form which the game would interpret; decades before the “cloud” language processing technology that the likes of Amazon and Google currently use to power their virtual assistants. In some ways the genre was ahead of its time, but it didn’t survive the graphical revolution for home computers. Of course, these games still have some diehard fans out there.

[Dan The Geek] is one such fan. He loves text based adventure games like Zork so much that he wanted to create his own implementation of the core technology that made these games possible all those years ago. But he didn’t want to just do it on this desktop computer, there’s already projects that let you run these classic games on modern hardware. He wanted to see if he could run these classic games on a modern microcontroller, and create a authentic retro experience on a handy portable device.

[Dan] starts by explaining the technology used to make titles like these possible in the days when the wide array of home computer types required a nuanced approach. By separating the story files from the actual interpreter, developers could more easily port the games to various computers. In theory these interpreters, known as “Z-machines”, could be written for any computer that could compile C code, had enough RAM to hold the story, and had a terminal and keyboard. Not exactly the kind of system requirements we’re used to seeing for modern PC games, but it was the 1980’s.

In theory a modern microcontroller will meet these requirements, so [Dan] wanted to create his own Z-machine for one. But rather than “cheat” by using an SD card like previous Arduino Z-machines have, he wanted to see if there was a development board out there that could do it all internally. The answer came in the form of the Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express, with its 192 kB of RAM and 2 MB of SPI flash.

The Z-machine created by [Dan], which he’s calling A2Z, allows users to run Zork and other compatible interactive text games on the ItsyBitsy without any additional hardware. Just plug the board into your computer and you’ll be able to play the games over the the serial connection. He’s even implemented some retro color schemes to make the experience more authentic, like the blue of the Amiga or Compaq green.

We’ve covered previous projects that brought Zork and friends to the Arduino, your web browser via a virtual Altair 8800, and even some more exotic targets like custom FPGAs. You can play cave adventure, the game that inspired Zork, on the Supercon Badge.

The Zork Virtual Machine Implemented In Hardware

November 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and all the other Infocom text adventures are much more clever than the appear at first glance. They actually run on a virtual machine, with all the code for the game files squirreled away in the Z-machine format. This is great if you’re writing a game for a dozen platforms; once you have an interpreter running on one system, the entire library of games can be shipped out the door.

While the Z-machine has been ported to all the retrocomputers you can imagine and a few different brands of microcontrollers, no one has yet implemented the Z-machine in hardware. There’s a reason for this: it’s crazy. Nevertheless, [Charlie] managed to implement the Z-machine in an FPGA, using only a few extra commands for driving a display.

The circuit is constructed with a $10 eBay special FPGA, the Cyclone II EP2C5. Other than that, it’s just some Flash, some RAM, a display, and a whole lot of wire. The standard Z-machine spec is followed, version 3 specifically, meaning this text adventure on a chip can run nearly every Infocom game ever written. The most popular ones, at least.

This isn’t [Charlie]’s first time in the ring with the Infocom Z-machine. He ported the Z-machine to a freakin’ pen a few years ago.

You can check out [Charlie]’s video demo below. Because there was a bit of extra space in the FPGA, [Charlie] managed to put a Mandelbrot implementation and Space Invaders in as an easter egg.

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