Two Stop Bits | Does anyone know what games the Unix Z-Machine originally shipped for, if any, a...

KODust 3 days ago | parent

Does anyone know what games the Unix Z-Machine originally shipped for, if any, and for which machines? There wouldn't have been high demand in 1985 for a Unix version of Infocom games (understatement). There are mentions of the "AT&T PC" in the source, and a snippet of 68000 assembly language.

There's a Fooblitzky interpreter too, but that didn't ship for anything Unixlike.

Screwtapello 3 days ago
When the game Beyond Zork starts up, it asks the Z-Machine interpreter what platform the interpreter is running on. If it's a platform that supports graphics, the game uses a custom font to draw an on-screen map; if it's a platform that only supports text, it does not try to draw the on-screen map. If it's a VT220, it uses the VT220's built-in special characters to draw the map.
Probably nobody was buying a special VT220 edition of Beyond Zork, I think that version was used by the developers working at Infocom, who did their work on a minicomputer and terminals. I believe it was a VAX, rather than a Unix minicomputer, but it wouldn't surprise me if the Unix Z-Machine interpreter had a similar story behind it.
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- KODust 3 days ago
  Beyond Zork’s map drawing code will also produce an ASCII art variant of the map for systems that can’t easily handle the custom font, like, IIRC, the Apple II.
  The Infocom dev machine was a DECSystem 20 (PDP-10 architecture) until circa 1988, when they ported tools to the 68020-based Mac II.
  I expect they thought the Unix source would be a good basis for future non-Unix development; comments in the source itself allude to this possibility; I’m just wondering if it was used in any shipping product. I suspect it wasn’t.
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ChristopherDrum 3 days ago
I actually don't think any UNIX variant ever shipped as a commerical product. My gut feeling while working on the project was that it was perhaps a reference implementation, documenting proper z-machine behavior the various assembly versions needed to match. But that's a literal guess, TBH.
The list of known system codes (used as identification for packaging and so forth) can be seen here: http://pdd.if-legends.org/infocom/fact-sheet.txt
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- KODust 3 days ago
  Yup. With the state of compilers and microcomputers at the time, the only viable mass-market targets for the Unix version of the sources would have been the Mac and the Amiga. But those already had native interpreters by the time they had C compilers capable of building this source.
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