“ It should be added that a 512K Inform game would be gargantuan, 2.5 times the size of “Curses” (which is itself large as games go) - easily large enough to code the entire Zork and Enchanter trilogies into one."
Has anybody tried to piece together a “full” version of Zork (either the 1977 original, or some sort of cobbling together of zork1/zork2/zork3)? The historical sources have some “ifdef-like” constructs in them that seem to hint at shared code between the three.
Dungeon/Zork isn’t exactly Zork 1+2+3, more like Zork 1+2+Zork 3 endgame. Zork 3 is a bit of an outlier and is more of a “new” game.
I think you are much more likely to run out of dynamic and static memory before you hit the hard limit of 512kB. Jigsaw, I think, do some sharing of objects between vignets to save space.
That was usual with Inform 6 and 7. Looks like Dialog is different, as we were discussing last month.
Dreamhold, my biggest Z-code game, made it to 386k overall, 56k of RAM.
I imagine it could be tricky. Since Zork II contains a lot of rooms that were cut from Mainframe Zork in making Zork I, it would make sense to re-insert them in the general area where they originally were. So how do the things that were added in the Zork Trilogy interact with each other, e.g. how would the Thief react to the Wizard?
Yeah, the big difficulty would be with the different parts interacting with each other. It would theoretically be possible to put them all in as separate games—as in, with their own routines, dictionaries, everything, no overlap—but at that point there’s no real benefit over just zipping all the data files together and posting them that way.
I agree there’s not much point trying to glue the Zork trilogy together into a single game. Even if you did, it would be very different than the mainframe version.
We should be clear that this was a matter of saving effort by creating a common “parser library” whose code was (mostly) shared between Zork 1/2/3. There was never any intent of compiling the three into one game file. Indeed the ifdefs would have made that impossible.
(Infocom didn’t have a formal parser library until the z6 games. But it seems that by 1984, they thought it was worth putting the Zork trilogy on a common parser base.)
Correct, Zarf, is also my philological analysis of the mid-late Infocom sources, they started off from a barebones Zork source code; needless to say, the world model library was the logical and natural evolution.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.