Is there a list of Infocom hacks anywhere? I can only find a few:
Modified Zork I: GitHub - heasm66/modified_zork1
Mini-Zork II: GitHub - eriktorbjorn/minizork2-renovated
Dr Grue / Grueland (Zork I very modified): GitHub - Kweepa/zork1-gold: Dr Grue (Zork I mod)
Planetfall Gold: GitHub - Kweepa/planetfall-gold: Infocom's Planetfall, modernized
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The real site for Mini-Zork II: GitHub - eriktorbjorn/minizork2-renovated
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Thanks, I changed the link in my post to this one.
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Howdy, hope all are well? I know I don’t post much these days but still pop in occasionally and this came up on my feed, so I thought I’d chip back in on a couple of things. 
Looking back, I don’t think I ever found any of the languages “easy”. I don’t even think I can honestly say if I found any of them “easier” than the others. For example my initial dalliance into Inform 7 gave me the initial impression that I’d find it easier than ZIL, but actually after the initial buzz of how how quickly I could prototype a couple of rooms with a table, a box and a blue ball I immediately found it as hard to remember as anything else. Certainly I stand by my long held assertion that ZIL and Inform 6 are equally as “hard/easy” in and of themselves as languages - learning resources excluded.
So I guess my original thoughts (to answer the “why ZIL you madman, do it in in Inform or something”) were as follows. Firstly, I’d long been championing keeping ZIL alive and it’s the one I personally know best. Secondly, specifically in terms of hacking/enhancing the original Infocom games, they’re programmed in ZIL already of course so to that end the effort to edit the ZIL code is quicker and easier than re-coding the whole thing in another language. Thirdly, the hacks/edits aren’t as complex as you may think and in fact often you’re simplifying code rather than adding it.
Re’ the creation of new stuff… Yeah I can understand why you would wonder why ZIL versus a newer language. The answers though are similar to those given for hacking/enhancing. Namely its the language I personally had/have the most experience with, I never personally found the other languages that much easier, I thought it would be cool to keep ZIL going etc etc
Stay safe all, hope your 2023 is all good! 
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First of all, I just want to say welcome back to the IFCF (are those the right words? I’m bad at talking to people. My words may be a bit strange…)
Reminding me of this thread, do you (or anybody) know the meaning behind Hypochondriac? And the other two games - Boot & Bath…
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Inspired by another topic ( here ) it would be great if the original games could be added an optional tutorial, either by moving the player to an off-topic playing field tutorial or a getting-started tutorial helping the player through the first few/several puzzles.
I am especially thinking of Wishbringer but perhaps also the other “introductory” Infocom games which I haven’t played.
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IIRC, in the past someone implemented, in inform, the demo transcripts in the infocom documentation, let’s start with porting these into ZIL…
… albeit I think that some of those transcripts deserve being collated into a sort of unofficial “inform sampler 3”, whose seems to me an interesting idea…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Hi everyone!
Long-time lurker here. A bit of thread necromancy, perhaps, but I am very curious as to which Infocom games (if any) have been released with known bugs removed/corrected?
It suprises me somewhat theat the first instinct among many people seem to be to first and foremost remove hunger and similar features from the games, rather than focusing on removing the known and lengthy list of bugs (not to mention improving on the parser/vocabulary, which also seems to be way more of a priority than removal of carrying capacity and hunger mechanics), but maybe there are such new builds, based on corrected/improved source code, available for download somewhere?
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There’s this project on GitHub that have the source for many Infocom games compilable with Zilf. There’s also an extensive list of bugs with potential fixes for many of them. You’ll need to compile them yourself though…
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Excellent! I browsed around for a bit, but my very limited understanding of Github stopped me from grasping everything, I think.
If I have understood it correctly, though, there are no “remedied” files available, just suggestions for how to change the ZIL code?
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Yes, that’s correct.
My apologies if bumping is frowned upon here, but I get the impression this forum is more lenient about bumps than many places.
Perhaps I’m biased due to having spent 20+ years on a forum dedicated to hacking old video games and preserving gaming history, and perhaps I’m biased because remaking games is a concept I was introduced to before I was introduced to text adventures.
I personally would be quite fine with, and would love to play remasters of classic Infocom titles that bring them in line with the sensibilities of modern IF, and had I still a working eye, I think it would be awesome to re imagine the Zork Games in the style of a 2-D Zelda(And conversely, I’d love to play a reimagining of a 2-D Zelda as a text adventure). The puzzles don’t necessarily need to be made any easier and the death count can still be high(Heck, add in a death count like some Zelda games do and have no deaths as a potential challenge run if you like), but puzzles that reset if you mess up bad enough and making it so you have to go out of your way to put the game in an unwinnable state and never need more than one save file and less fighting with the parser would go a long way towards making these games less impenetrable. And hey, maybe include a Hardcore mode that disables the protections against unwinnable by mistake while still providing a more modern parser.
To my mind, it wouldn’t be fundamentally different from someone Hacking Pokemon FireRed to implement the content that was added in Pokemon Yellow or hacking A Link to the Past to make a 16-bit version of Zelda I.
Granted, given that parser games are more similar to one another than most video games, even ones from the same franchise, there might not be much point to Hacking one of the Zork Trilogy games if you wanted to make a fan-made Zork IV instead of just writing it from scratch with a modern IF engine.
Definitely not in favor of trying to have any fan-made remasters replace the originals(heck, had I still a working eye, I’d be tempted to replay both Pokemon Red/Blue and FireRed/LeafGreen and both the NES, SNES, and GBC/A versions of Super Mario Bros. through World).
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