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Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

Being aware of the background of the author, I guess it has ZX support, for sure, but not for the z-machine.

Anyway, more IF is always good, but not for the ones like "Choose your own adventure", as these game are extremely linear. OFC, most of IF games can be put as "linear", but a lot of them have different methods to reach a point or solve a puzzle.

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Would be great if there were files available for the Z-machine that played out the original Edward Packard CYOA series, like Through The Black Hole, e.g.

Those could be implemented trivially even with raw Inform6. Or any language. Even HTML, too.

They're not available for sale, but you can find them all as clickable epubs. (Any device that can run a Z-machine can run an epub reader just as easily.)

Any modern device will run both, but Infocom's Z-machine ran on old 8-bit home computers. Even if you ignore EPUB's image support (which includes the complicated SVG format), EPUB is zipped XHTML+CSS. I'd be very surprised if you could fit a parser and renderer for all that in the limited RAM they had available.

V3 games ran on 8 bit computers, but v5 games (most of modern ones) only run well under a 16 bit one. As for epubs, netbsd runs on Amiga and Classic Mac, and if lynx and unzip work, so do epub files with a crappy script.

It's 2020 and an RPI or an ESP32 are dirt cheap, and you can get a 486 machine even for free.

I suppose an epub would be pretty easy to convert (on a modern machine) into something like ZIL for ZILF. Good thinking.

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