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. But more even more than a technological tour de force, Zork is an unmissable milestone in the history of computer gaming. They used every trick in the book to pack as much of the Underground Empire into computers that had only 32 kB of RAM. 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. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. Posted in classic hacks, computer hacks, Games, Retrocomputing Tagged Å-machine, Dialog, infocom, z-machineĬomputer games have been around about as long as computers have. Here’s to another few decades of the Zork-legacy.
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. We think it’s great to see that there’s still so much interest in the platform. We covered Zork and the Z-Machine a while ago in some detail. As the documentation notes, many Z-Machine based stories exist today that are unplayable on vintage hardware due to lack of optimization. Its goals are to be easy to follow, with a minimal number of language concepts, and high performance.
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.Īs 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. 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. We’ve seen a number of improved runtimes and languages for the platform over the years, with ’s Dialog language a newcomer.Ĭovering 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, has also implemented a new runtime, called the ‘ Å-Machine‘, since ‘Å’ follows ‘Z’ in the alphabet (if you’re Swedish, that is). 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.
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