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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...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/

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/

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 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/

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

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