After usiing a basic stamp DECADES ago, finally took the plunge with the cheap and feature rich M5 CoreS3 and made a little 2 choice adventure for my kid, see video. I know with punyinform and stuff folks are super into getting stuff running on toasters but wondering if there’s anything active in this department? Screen size excused I think maybe twine could do well here?
I don’t know if there’s anything active, but the ease of making something that’ll do choice-based IF makes it a thing that plenty of people have tinkered with over the years. The Choosatron used a little wireless ARM board (Cortex M3 chip?) and a thermal printer, Hugo Labrande did a similar thing with a Raspberry Pi and a thermal printer about 5 years back, etc.
Twine requires a web browser so it’s pretty heavyweight, but something along those lines… yeah.
I’m not sure about active, but people have gotten the Z-machine working on an Arduino before, and on at least one FPGA too.
If you wanted to, maybe you could implement an interpreter that reads Twee code (e.g. Chapbook) and adapt to the screen with your own interface.
There’s a game out now in Parsercomp that uses just a dpad and two buttons and a tiny screen with scrolling text. It’s designed to work on a device playable with your thumbs:
https://itch.io/jam/parsercomp-2026/rate/4722554
whats the actual device this is supposed to be played on?
The TinyCircuits Thumby keychain. (Which contains an RPi SOC.)
A bit off-topic since it’s for a fantasy console rather than a real target, but the Status Line project (IFWiki) put some effort into Z-code parser IF on small screens, including rebuilding some classic games to work better on small screens.
I’m more into retrocomputing than trainer/SBC, but I admit that I fooled around with the idea of CYOA for very old (emulated) machines, and their memory/palette/screen size limits (UI isn’t much a problem,inkey$ and like…)
I think that a 3-5 passages, 2-3 choices CYOA can fit into an unexpanded VIC-20’s 3,5K of RAM, provided that the “story” is a mere technical demo.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’m reminded of a Gameboy port of Zork I I stumbled upon once upon a time… granted, it was annoying to play since you had to cycle through available input characters with the D-pad, input characters with A, and submit commands with start or something like that. I suspect a TI-83 port would be less annoying to play if you get really good attyping on its keypad.
benkid77 has been doing YouTube walkthroughs on some pretty obscure games on obscure platforms. The more observant of you will notice that some of these are original games that probably aren’t catalogued anywhere else.
See CASA for a list of benkid77’s original games on platforms such as Micral N (written in assembly language in 2025), Intel 4004 (also written in assembly language in 2025) and Datapoint 2200 (written in assembly language in 2026).
All benkid77’s games are text adventures (parser-based IF), so writing these in assembly language is quite a feat.
DEFINITIVELY a feat; is hard coding for the 8008, with his 16K maximum memory, but on the 4 bit harvard architecture of the venerable 4004 ??? O_O
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
(studying that 4004 source…)
Eh, that thing can boot Linux.[1]
…sort of, very slowly, with a ludicrous amount of supporting hardware. ↩︎