>read leaflet

Hello sailor!

This is an implementation of Infocom's Z-Machine. The Z-Machine is a virtual machine that's something like a high-level CPU. To keep their games portable and easier to write, Infocom's games all use this fake processor and ship with a platform-specific Z-Machine "emulator" ... so a game could run wherever someone had implemented the Z-Machine.

This project is just for fun; everyone should write this at some point as an educational activity. If you want a serious Z-Machine implementation, there are certainly better ones out there (I personally recommend "Frotz" and there are many others, too).

This program currently supports most of the Version 3 Z-Machine. This is enough to play the vast majority of Infocom's catalog. Later Infocom games used version 4, 5, and 6 of the Z-Machine, and those will currently not run here. Most modern Interactive Fiction is built with a tool called Inform and usually targets version 5 at the lowest; these games currently don't work with this project. Maybe later.

Activision, who acquired Infocom in the 1990's, gives out Zork I, II, and III for free, so I've included Zork I's data files with this project. If you want to see Zork I run through from start to finish, you can run a pre-written script to complete the entire game from the command line, like this:

./mojozork ./zork1.dat ./zork1-script.txt

If you want to write your own Z-Machine, there is an "official" specification on how to implement it, written by people that spent significant time reverse engineering the originals from Infocom, and extending the ecosystem with new tools. You can find that specification here.

As usual, Wikipedia offers a wonderful rabbit hole to fall down, too, in their Z-machine article.

On top of the MojoZork code, there is a telnet server called multizorkd that lets several people connect to the same game and play it as a multiplayer experience. Each player has their own inventory and can move independent of others. This probably only works on Linux/Unix systems, but the single-player mojozork program should work on just about anything.

You can play MultiZork right now by pointing a telnet client at multizork.icculus.org (or running nc multizork.icculus.org 23).

A post on my Patreon explains the motivations and technical details of multizork. If you like this, please consider throwing in a dollar so I can keep doing wild things like this!

Ever want to play Z-Machine games under RetroArch? Now you can. The libretro core handles all the tapdancing to make text-based games run in a graphical window, and can be played with a keyboard (in RetroArch focus mode), or with a mouse or game controller on an included virtual keyboard.

Enjoy!

--ryan.