![]() ![]() It takes a while to get the hang of writing games using Inform but you’ll be creating mysterious worlds to your heart’s content soon enough. Game development is interesting as you really don’t need to be a programmer at all: Inform’s “language” is very similar to standard English and the interpreter then translates that into Z-code (or into another similar bytecode called Glulx, which is more suitable for games that include multimedia content). If you want to create your own game, you can do that too, thanks to a program called Inform that runs on Windows, Macs and Linux. From there you can download the games, and most of them work in Zoom or Frotz since they’re written in Z-code. There are also many IF games that have been written by other people, and the best place to look for these is The Interactive Fiction Database, which is a searchable archive. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to open it in Zoom or Frotz and immediately start playing. Should you happen to download or buy one of these games, you’ll find that you need to rename the data file, whose name ends in DAT, so that it ends in Z8. You might also still be able to buy a compilation of the games that Activision released in the 1990s (Infocom was taken over by Activision in 1986, but it abandoned the Infocom trademark in the early 2000s). The interpreter itself is of no use without games, of course, but you can find the old Infocom games online very easily, although the legality may be slightly questionable. For Windows folk, Frotz is probably your best option, and there’s even a port of Frotz for the iPhone and iPad, so you can play your games while you’re out and about. ![]() If you’re using a Mac the gold standard is Zoom, which supports not only plain-text games but also adventure games with graphics. The key ones are, of course, open source. This, as it turns out, is very likely because there are Z-code interpreters for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and pretty well any platform that you’re likely to be using. That’s great news for us now, because it means that to play all of these old games, all you need do is implement a Z-code interpreter for your particular OS (or, perhaps more realistically, hope that someone else has already done so). Infocom took this virtual machine approach because there were so many different types of personal computer around at that time, so by writing a Z-code interpreter for each new platform the company could immediately make all its products available on that platform. The Z in Z-machine in fact stands for Zork, which was the company’s first famous adventure game. The standard way that IF games are written is by employing a virtual machine called a Z-machine, which was originally written back in the late 1970s by Infocom, the main company in the IF world at that time. There’s a thriving community of interactive fiction enthusiasts who’ve created interpreters capable of playing all these old games ![]() It turns out that isn’t a problem, because there’s a thriving community of IF enthusiasts who’ve created interpreters capable of playing all these old games, and they’ve even created systems that enable you to author your own titles. I suffered a bout of nostalgia recently and wanted to revisit some of those old games but, of course, I no longer own that BBC Micro. In the latter category were what we called “adventure” games, and which are nowadays more generally known as interactive fiction (IF). Ah, the innocence of youth.īack then, computer games either had pathetically basic graphics or were entirely text-based. I got around the overheating problem by running it with the top off and a glass of cold water balanced on the chip. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80, followed rapidly by a ZX81, a Commodore PET and a BBC Micro, which I bought second-hand and that was missing the heatsink from its CPU. ![]()
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