Zork Zcode Interpreters Appear Out of Nowhere | Hacker News Reader

Zork Zcode Interpreters Appear Out of Nowhere

hackaday.com

39 pointsTomte14 comments

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326878

and in particular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38328521

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Infocom-zcode-terps: Historical source code for Infocom's Z-machine interpreters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38326878 - Nov 2023 (23 comments)

Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37893794 - Oct 2023 (160 comments)

the article says the game has been public domain for a while... as far as I know, that's not true at all.

infocom -> activision -> microsoft

So it's now lost among a zillion other things microsoft owns and doesnt give a shit about and squats on, like my personal favorite HCCB https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/high-capaci...

The article gets some other major details wrong, like:

> Zork is not a PDP-10 executable, it’s actually a virtual machine executable, which is in turn run by an interpreter written for the PDP-10.

This summary confuses two or three different generations of Zork -- the original MDL and Fortran versions written at MIT (which did indeed run on the PDP-10) and the later ZIL reimplementation by Infocom (which used the Z-machine VM and was targeted at microcomputers). As far as I'm aware, there was never an interpreter for the PDP-10, only the -11, and even then only for internal use.

If I recall correctly, the Infocom company was originally started to be a database company (hence the name), and the virtual machine interpreter was meant to run the LISP variant that they were going to use to write their database product. The database thing did not pan out, and they instead brushed off the old Zork program they got from the MIT systems, ported a piece of it (the whole original Zork for mainframes would not fit the micros they were targetting) to their virtual machine.

Disclaimer: I have only ever read about this, and I’m probably misremembering many details.

The database product came later in Infocom's life. The Z-machine was designed specifically to port Zork. Jimmy Maher covers the birth, life, and death of Infocom in great detail:

https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/the-birth-of-infocom/

It’s amazing how rumors can distort the true story. I thank you for the authoritative link!

The Fortran version wasn't written at MIT.

This won't be the fault of Microsoft if the Infocom stuff is lost, that's the fault of Activision. Source? I was there. I worked at Activision soon after Bobby Kotick took over, and worked on both the Zork Anthology, as well as on Return To Zork. The original Infocom server was bought/taken home by another coworker, and I had/have a backup of it somewhere. When we were working on the various ports, there was a ton of source code missing, and there were no organization documents for anything. In a bunch of cases, we had to reach out to the original Infocom staff to try and make sense of it.

I would not use the word 'Nowhere' for the very well known - in IF circles - Andrew Plotkin.

https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps

Did anyone else trip over the unclear usage of ZIP? Z-machine program files and PKZIP files share the .zip file extension, but not file formats.

> Z-machine program files and PKZIP files share the .zip file extension

Modern Z-machine programs typically use extensions like .z3, .z5, and .z8 for Z-machine programs (with the digit depending on the version of the VM used). I've only seen .zip used within Infocom, before PKZIP was a thing.

more backstory - https://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/11/infocom-interpreters

Some beautiful assembly code in there.

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