A Puny(Inform) Achievement
Aug. 2nd, 2022 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile trying out “full-screen video for the (emulated) TRS-80,” I took another look at some message boards recommended by the emulator and video player’s programmer. On one of them, I happened on another recent accomplishment for those old computers, one better aligned with my impressions of their homely capabilities. Someone had programmed a new “Z-machine interpreter,” which could play more of Infocom’s interactive fiction and the text adventures built afterwards on a foundation of reverse engineering than the interpreters Infocom had provided for Radio Shack’s computers in the 1980s. I could put the interpreter file and the “Z-code” games on a disk image (even if I had to use a Windows utility via Wine), and proved the concept with “MST3K: Detective.”
As I contemplated writing a post about that, though, I did have to consider how it was as much a case of “that it could have been done back then is kind of interesting” as anything else I can manage with old computers. It’s not so much of an “amusing downgrade” as other things I’ve tried in recent months, but that’s a matter of being quite able to play Z-code games with much less in the way of setup. I also knew “the Z-machine links then and now” doesn’t encompass every text adventure; recent games aren’t tailored to limited resources the way Infocom’s games were.
There have been modern efforts made about that, however, and I was already aware of them. In having experimented with the latest “natural language programming” version of the text adventure language Inform (without grand ideas of adventure games to write) I’d supposed its previous version was too much for me to handle, but all of a sudden the thought of at least taking another look at “PunyInform,” promised to make games “8-bit computers” could handle better, was in my mind.
To use the PunyInform library I would have to use the old “Inform 6” compiler, but it turned out the library requested you use the latest version of that compiler, which wasn’t available in my regular “package managers.” I resolved to press on and try to compile it myself, even if that remains a matter of typing in the magic incantation and hoping all the stars align this time. They did, and I managed to turn one of the sample source code files into a simple game.
With that accomplished I started wondering about getting these games on (emulated) old computers other than the TRS-80. Someone had set up a “build environment” to create disk images for over two dozen old computers; however, it’s meant for Linux. Before getting around to my virtual machines I poked into the Radio Shack Color Computer shell file and noticed it used a standard Unix utility, skipping over program tracks in a preconfigured disk image to copy in the data file. Once I’d done that myself in Terminal, I noticed the disk image had provided the old Infocom interpreter, which ran on the earliest Color Computers but in a cramped, all-caps screen. It took a bit more fiddling to get the specially hacked interpreter that could use most of the Color Computer 3’s improved capabilities working. I then experimented a bit with making Apple II disk images just for the sake of it. Whether I can sort out enough of Inform 6 to get even the simplest experiments running in it as well is a question, but managing to get back to “the computer has to think about what you typed in and then go to the disk for the results” was a long weekend’s amusement in itself.
As I contemplated writing a post about that, though, I did have to consider how it was as much a case of “that it could have been done back then is kind of interesting” as anything else I can manage with old computers. It’s not so much of an “amusing downgrade” as other things I’ve tried in recent months, but that’s a matter of being quite able to play Z-code games with much less in the way of setup. I also knew “the Z-machine links then and now” doesn’t encompass every text adventure; recent games aren’t tailored to limited resources the way Infocom’s games were.
There have been modern efforts made about that, however, and I was already aware of them. In having experimented with the latest “natural language programming” version of the text adventure language Inform (without grand ideas of adventure games to write) I’d supposed its previous version was too much for me to handle, but all of a sudden the thought of at least taking another look at “PunyInform,” promised to make games “8-bit computers” could handle better, was in my mind.
To use the PunyInform library I would have to use the old “Inform 6” compiler, but it turned out the library requested you use the latest version of that compiler, which wasn’t available in my regular “package managers.” I resolved to press on and try to compile it myself, even if that remains a matter of typing in the magic incantation and hoping all the stars align this time. They did, and I managed to turn one of the sample source code files into a simple game.
With that accomplished I started wondering about getting these games on (emulated) old computers other than the TRS-80. Someone had set up a “build environment” to create disk images for over two dozen old computers; however, it’s meant for Linux. Before getting around to my virtual machines I poked into the Radio Shack Color Computer shell file and noticed it used a standard Unix utility, skipping over program tracks in a preconfigured disk image to copy in the data file. Once I’d done that myself in Terminal, I noticed the disk image had provided the old Infocom interpreter, which ran on the earliest Color Computers but in a cramped, all-caps screen. It took a bit more fiddling to get the specially hacked interpreter that could use most of the Color Computer 3’s improved capabilities working. I then experimented a bit with making Apple II disk images just for the sake of it. Whether I can sort out enough of Inform 6 to get even the simplest experiments running in it as well is a question, but managing to get back to “the computer has to think about what you typed in and then go to the disk for the results” was a long weekend’s amusement in itself.