New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches

Software
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First of a three part post by Jimmy Maher on the people who reverse-engineered Infocom’s Z-Machine so that they could parse Infocom’s story files. I find it interesting as a vivid example of the kind of work developers who have ‘an inch to scratch’ are willing to do to play Infocom games that were no longer officially supported for their platforms.

One of the most oddly inspiring stories I know of in all computing history is that of the resurrection and re-purposing of the Z-Machine, Infocom’s virtual machine of the 1980s, to serve a whole new community of interactive-fiction enthusiasts in the 1990s and well beyond. Even as the simple 8-bit computers for which it had originally been designed became obsolete, and then became veritable antiques, the Z-Machine just kept soldiering on, continuing to act as the delivery system for hundreds of brand new games that post-dated the company that had created it by years and eventually decades.
[…]
[A] design which Joel Berez and Marc Blank first sketched out hurriedly at their kitchen tables in 1979, in response to the urgently immediate problem of how to move their DEC PDP-10 game of Zork out of the MIT computer lab and onto microcomputers, didn’t fall out of general use as a delivery medium for new games until after 2010. And even today it still remains in active use as a legacy technology, the delivery medium for half or more of the best text adventures in the historical canon. In terms of the sheer number of platforms on which it runs, it must have a strong claim to being the most successful virtual machine in history; it runs on everything from e-readers to game consoles, from mobile phones to mainframes, from personal computers to electronic personal assistants. (To paraphrase an old joke, it really wouldn’t surprise me to learn that someone is running it on her toaster…) Its longevity is both a tribute to the fundamental soundness of its original design and to the enduring hold which Infocom’s pioneering interactive fiction of the 1980s has had upon more recent practitioners of the form. Like so many technology stories, in other words, the story of the Z-Machine is really about people.

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It helps to include links to the actual “New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine” posts. :-)

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It’s rather good to (re)visit Jimmy Maher’s articles after a week or more (much more in this case perhaps) to read the comments - often the people in the stories, or near to them, are there to add detail.

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There’s a quote from Graham Nelson in Part 2 that I particularly like:

But [the ZX Spectrum] did have an enormous amount of RAM — or rather, it didn’t consume all of that precious RAM on screen memory. The way that it avoided this was a distasteful hack, but also a stroke of genius, making the Spectrum a perfect games machine. As a result, those of my friends whose fathers knew anything about computers had BBC Micros, and the rest had Spectrums. It is somehow very English of us to have invented a new class distinction in the 1980s, but I rather think we did.

These “class distinctions” probably existed in every part of the world. I certainly know that I, as a 13 year old Apple II user, felt greatly superior to the “kids” who used a VIC-20 or, worse yet, a Timex Sinclair. Even the Commodore 64 was more of a “toy” or, at best, “games machine,” rather than a serious computing device that could run systems like Apple Pascal. (A system in which I wrote only toy programs, as far as I can recall.)

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