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Comment by numlocked | Hacker News Reader

You can play a lot of the old Infocom text adventures here:

http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/

I highly recommend Planetfall.

(warning: Requires a somewhat-sketchy-seeming-but-harmless-i-think Java applet. Chrome gives you a hard time about it, but if you create an exception for the site in the java control panel (on OS X: settings->Java->security), then you can play it in Safari)

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It's also not that hard to get your hands on the Z-Code files of Infocom games and run them in a Z-Code interpreter. (Note, however, that they are still under copyright. Also, for some games, you'll also need a copy of the original docs or other material from the packaging as Infocom sometimes used info in the docs, decoder wheels, etc. as a low-grade anti-piracy technique.)

Agree that Planetfall is one of the better ones. Steve Meretzky also wrote A Mind Forever Voyaging which I really enjoyed although it's somewhat atypical of Infocom games in a few ways.

and you'll find z-code interpreters for pretty much any device you can think of. I like in particular Gargoyle [1][2] which stands out as the only one with great font rendering/typography.

One of the coolest/ridiculous things about infocom games were the feelies [3] (a term they coined) There is a great collection [4] of photographs of all the packages and extras, some of which were including necessary clues to solve the games.

[1] http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/ [2] https://github.com/garglk/garglk [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feelie [4] http://gallery.guetech.org/

I grabbed a copy of ztools and put them in github here, surprisingly they compile on a modern day Debian system without any change,

https://github.com/ecliptik/ztools

Here's a short blog post I wrote on de-compiling interactive fiction using them,

http://www.ecliptik.com/Decompiling-Interactive-Fiction/

There are any number of free text adventure games built using Z-Code or Glulx systems (or newer alternatives, like Twine) that you can play online:

http://ifdb.tads.org

Much of the relevant copy protection information has been merged with information from the Encyclopedia Frobozzica (included as a printed feelie with Return to Zork) and replicated to various sites in wiki form.

For instance, the infotater from Sorcerer had a color code mapped to various creatures that was required to progress past the intro area of the game. The copy-protection sewer map for Leather Goddesses of Phobos is the most annoying thing ever.

There are also deprotection patches available.

As I bought most of the original games the first time around, and the two Lost Treasures of Infocom CD compilations, and never resold them, I don't have any qualms about downloading the game data files, with the exceptions of BattleTech Crescent Hawk 1&2 and Leather Goddesses 2.

But now you can get Lost Treasures of Infocom as a free iOS app. So downloading the app is granting license for the included games, at least for that device.

>But now you can get Lost Treasures of Infocom as a free iOS app.

That apparently just includes Zork but you can buy the rest of the Z-Code games (except for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--I assume for rights reasons related to Douglas Adam's estate) for just $9.99 which is still quite a deal. I'd have to try it out and see how playable it is without a keyboard though.

iOS devices that are jailbroken may have the means to access additional app content without paying the normal in-app purchase price.

I am not recommending this for the LToI app unless you, like myself, have already purchased legitimately licensed copies of those games at least once already.

...and if you're interested in doing more than playing games, there's assorted abusive things you can do with the Z-Machine.

Here's an ANS Forth: https://code.google.com/p/zmforth/

Here's Andrew Plotkin's infamous Lisp tutorial (complete with Lisp implementation for the Z-machine): http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zweb/lists/

I ported a C compiler to it, poorly, and made it play chess: http://cowlark.com/vbcc-z-compiler/

And, of course, you can design processors to run it on real hardware: https://github.com/charcole/Z3

And Graham Nelson's Inform 7 compiles to two different editions of the Z-machine: http://inform7.com/

You can play some of these on the archive (no Java required)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Planetfall_1983

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobo...

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