Collaborate Disseminate
I found myself in Milton Keynes, UK, a little while ago, with a few hours to spare. What could I do but rock over to the National Museum of Computing …read more Continue reading Walking and Talking Through the UK National Museum of Computing
Some of our readers may know about Zork (and 1, 2, 3), the 1977 text adventure originally written for the PDP-10. The game has been public domain for a while …read more Continue reading Zork Zcode Interpreters Appear Out Of Nowhere
In case you wanted to run WordStar on your Mac, [Tom Harte] offers CP/M for OS/X, and it looks like it would be a lot of fun. Of course you …read more Continue reading Apple Gets CP/M
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams explore the coolest hacks of the past 168 hours. The big news this week: will Wink customers pony up $5 a month to turn their lights on and off? There’s a new open source design for a pick and place machine. You may …read more
Though mostly known for its releases on countless 8-bit personal computers from the 1970s and 1980s, the game of Zork began its life on a PDP-10 mainframe. Recently, MIT released the original source code for this version of Zork. As we covered a while ago, the history of Zork is …read more
Continue reading Original Zork MDL Source Code Has Been Released
Computer games have been around about as long as computers have. And though it may be hard to believe, Zork, a text-based adventure game, was the Fortnite of its time. But Zork is more than that. For portability and size reasons, Zork itself is written in Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), …read more
Continue reading Zork And The Z-Machine: Bringing The Mainframe To 8-bit Home Computers
For anyone who’s been fiddling around with computers since the days before VGA, “Hunt the Wumpus” probably brings back fond memories. Developed in 1973, this text game has you move around a system of caves searching for the foul-smelling Wumpus, a vile creature which you must dispatch with your trusty bow and arrow. Some consider it to be one of the very first survival horror games ever developed, a predecessor to the Resident Evil franchise as well as the video game version of Hannah Montana: The Movie.
If the concept of “Hunt the Wumpus” sounds interesting to you, …read more
Before computer games had all these fancy graphics, text based games were a very popular genre. Rather than move a character on the screen, you’d type out commands for your player in sentence form which the game would interpret; decades before the “cloud” language processing technology that the likes of Amazon and Google currently use to power their virtual assistants. In some ways the genre was ahead of its time, but it didn’t survive the graphical revolution for home computers. Of course, these games still have some diehard fans out there.
[Dan The Geek] is one such fan. He loves …read more
[Robert Baruch] wanted to tackle a CPU project using an FPGA. One problem you always have is you can either mimic something that has tools and applications or you can go your own way and just build everything from scratch (which is much harder).
[Robert] took the mimic approach–sort of. He built a CPU with the express idea of running Infocom’s Z-machine virtual machine, which allows it to play Zork. So at least when you are done, you don’t have to explain to your non-tech friends that it only blinks an LED. Check out the video, below, for more details. …read more
[Robert Baruch] wanted to tackle a CPU project using an FPGA. One problem you always have is you can either mimic something that has tools and applications or you can go your own way and just build everything from scratch (which is much harder).
[Robert] took the mimic approach–sort of. He built a CPU with the express idea of running Infocom’s Z-machine virtual machine, which allows it to play Zork. So at least when you are done, you don’t have to explain to your non-tech friends that it only blinks an LED. Check out the video, below, for more details. …read more
