From Retrosoftware

Revision as of 21:02, 30 September 2008

by Jon Welch

Introduction

Legendary text adventure developer, Infocom, designed their games to run as a virtual machine, known as a Z-Machine. This meant that all of the company's interactive fiction games could be ported to a new platform by simply porting the underlying Z-Machine Interpreter. Infocom never officially released a port of their games to the BBC Micro, though they were rumoured to have created a prototype interpreter which was abandoned due to concerns about potential software piracy. In the '90s, fans reverse-engineered the Z-Machine format and have ported the Z-Machine Interpreter to many new platforms including mobile phones, hand-held consoles and PDAs. A new language, Inform, was also created for designing new adventures which could be complied into the Z-machine format.

This project aims to port the Z-Machine Interpreter to the BBC Micro, allowing you to run most of the non-graphical Infocom back-catalogue of games, as well as many modern adventures created with Inform. Inform 6 can also be used to write your own v3 games which can then be played on the BBC Micro.

Discuss BBC Micro Z-Machine Interpreter

BBC Micro Z-Machine v1.1 (Infocom v3) Interpreter

Target Systems: BBC Microcomputer
License: Freeware
Developed in: BBC BASIC (prototype), 6502 assembler

Interactive fiction / text adventure interpreter for running Infocom v3-only Z-Code / Inform games including 24 from Infocom such as Zork I and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as home-brew fan creations.

BBC Micro Z-Machine v1.1 (Infocom v3-5) Interpreter

PROJECT STATUS: On Hold
Target Systems: BBC Microcomputer B+ / Master 128 only
License: Freeware
Developed in: BBC BASIC (prototype), 6502 assembler

Interactive fiction / text adventure interpreter for running Infocom v3 - v5 Z-Code / Inform games including virtually all the Infocom catalogue such as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Beyond Zork as well as home-brew fan creations including many available from the IF archive.

Inform / Z-Machine v1.1 (Infocom v3) Development Environment

Target Systems: Windows (can be recreated on other platforms supported by Inform and BeebEm, such as Mac OS X and Linux)

BBC Micro Z-Machine v1.1 (Infocom v3) Interpreter distributed with Inform 6.15 for use as a complete Z-Machine v1.1 (Infocom v3) development environment to create new IF works / text adventures for use with the BBC Micro or any other platform with a Z-Machine interpreter, such as Game Boy/C64/Spectrum +3 etc.