Entries tagged “interactivefiction”

Interactive fiction has come to the iPhone with a great port of the Frotz Z-Machine player. It's free. To solve the problem of getting IF game files to the phone, Craig built an Internet-powered game file browser directly into the application. Very nice.

I don't mean to spoil anything by saying this out loud, but I wonder if this technically violates Apple's terms of service, which forbids language interpreters. I would presume that it would especially forbid interpreters that can evaluate code off of an arbitrary website. Of course, the definition of "interpreter" is debatably fuzzy, as any data-driven app could be considered an interpreter of the data. But Frotz is a straightforward example of an interpreter of code, and if the terms of service forbids interpreters for security reasons (Apple doesn't yet trust their own app sandboxing, or just doesn't trust app authors to do their own sandboxing), those concerns would apply to Frotz.

parchment, a Z-machine (text adventure player) implemented in pure browser JavaScript.

Flaxo, a new Z-machine interpreter implemented as embeddable Flash. Not done yet, but very promising as a new way to share Z-machine games (text adventures) with a large audience.

Original source code found for Colossal Cave Adventure, Wil Crowther's 1972 text adventure computer game. the FORTRAN source code accompanies an excellent article celebrating the anniversary of Adventure, which also includes photographs of the actual caves on which Adventure was based.

Adventure spawned dozens of remakes and extensions, but this is the first readily available copy of the original source code, long thought to be lost.