How to Build Inform 7 as Z5/Export as ZIL?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hello,
I’ve recently been trying to create a project in Inform 7. My goal is for my game to be playable on my 10 year old Kindle 3G running the kif interpreter. Since kif only supports versions older than .z5, and my Inform IDE only builds to Z8, I was wondering if there’s a way to:

  • Build Inform 7 directly as Z5 (I’ve tried downgrading IDE versions but that didn’t work)

or

  • Convert a Z8 file to Z5

I found this thread, however I couldn’t find any method to convert Z8 to Z5 (I can’t install ztools because I’m using a M1/arm64 Mac).
If anyone has any idea how I might easily build my Inform 7 project to Z5, please let me know.
Please let me know if I’m just missing something and there’s some easy way to do this - I’m a complete beginner.
Thank you in advance!

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2

I’m afraid that using modern Inform it just doesn’t seem possible to get a working game file into the space allowed by Z5 format. I tried to build a single empty room scenario using 9.3/6M62 (which is somewhat less demanding than 10.1.x), and the I6 compiler reports that it exceeds the memory limit by 68K – and that’s with OMIT_UNUSED_ROUTINES = 1 specified.

You might be able to get something to work with older versions, but most of the people compiling to Z5 use Inform 6 directly.

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3

I’ll look into modernizing ztools such that it’ll work on macos.

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4

You could also consider PunyInform. It can even build .z3

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5

ztools cannot convert from one Z-machine version to another.

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