On Sat, Mar 14, 2026 at 9:28 AM Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> The Visible Zorker is super nifty! I totally see what you mean about the >> language being Lispy. Did people program directly in it or was it just a >> p-code target for game generator programs? I'm looking forward to exploring >> it more and seeing if it will let me modify and execute code on the fly, >> but first I better play through Zork 2; I've never tried it before and it >> is clear these twisty passages are full of spoilers. >> > > It was a pcode engine for the game code written in the lisp type stuff. > There's a totally non lisp game compiler for it as well (inform) that was > written independently. > The Zork language (ZIL) comes from MDL which actually was a lisp and is > similar to DDL and ADL from UCLA. > So, the Z-machine is the pcode engine and both ZIL and Inform are languages that target that virtual machine, right? John: The Z-machine link <https://club100.org/memfiles/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Clinton%20Reddekop> you sent shows an overview, but gives "500: Try Again Later" when I click download <https://club100.org/memfiles/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=z100v0.1.zip&directory=Clinton%20Reddekop>. Is there some way to access the member files without the PHP script? I also looked for a ZIL/MDL interpreter that I could run on the Model T computers and it seems that in times of yore those tools ran on bigger hardware (PDP-10 running ITS) and little computers like ours would only connect as terminals. The best current tool I could find was ZILF <https://zilf.io> which will run on a modern PC. Since my Tandy 200 already logs in on my PC's serial port, it should theoretically work. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet. While ZILF's command line "REPL" looks very nifty, it ignores the TERMINFO database and locks up as soon as I hit BKSP, looping on an error message that my T200's screen dimension is -1. (Yes, a Model T displays less than 80 columns of text, but I assure you, it is not less than zero!) Thank you for the resources! I've read through some of the manuals, now I have to actually build something in order to learn it. —b9
