As part of my “>REMEMBER” newsletter, I wrote a little tutorial on how to make a machine that plays text adventures and prints the output on a thermal printer! This is similar to the Choosatron, but for parser-based text adventures, although you could replicate the Choosatron by writing choice-based adventures in Z-machine (using Moiki, for instance). And it’s very simple to make, requiring just a couple of modifications to an existing interpreter !
Usually the articles are exclusive to the newsletter (subscribe! You can even read the past issues!), but I’m going to break the rule for once and give the link to that article: it can be read here.
I havent quite solved the input problem, as I would like it to be self-contained and not require plugging a monitor. Currently, you can just have a keyboard and type your input with no visual feedback, but this isn’t great. Maybe using Bluetooth to send messages? Or maybe using speech-to-text, but can a Raspberry Pi handle that? Or a small LCD screen displaying the input as it is typed? If there is interest in digging further, I’d be happy to - the more this looks like “a magic box that spits out text adventures” and less like “I plugged a printer to my computer”, the greater the effect 