Hi
Just acquired one of these awesome 80’s machine and fairly well surprised nothing was ever developed for it to run the Infocom games!
Don’t suppose anyone with any experience in this area would have an idea whether it’s feasible/possible please?
Thanks
Neil
There’s ZXZVM, which is Z80 assembly, which I guess could be a starting point…
According to the specs I found, it has 48KB of RAM, 32 of which is typically accessible for user programs. If an interpreter can be written to use a bit more than 32KB, preferrably 40+ KB, playing an Infocom game might be feasible. However, in the sources I find, there is no mentioning of a disk drive for this computer. Do you know if it’s possible to connect a disk drive to it?
There are disk drives usable via an I/O unit but good luck finding any! Rarer than hens teeth. People usually load progs in by playing a .wav file of the converted .mzf files into a car cassette adapter in the cassette player
Without a disk drive, you can only play Z-code games that fit in RAM, together with an interpreter. If it’s possible to use all 48 KB of RAM, this still means the game can be no bigger than 40 KB. The smallest Infocom game is Minizork I, and it’s about 52 KB in size. The second smallest would be Zork I, ~85 KB.
Actually thinking about it, there are modern solutions that use a USB stick instead, with a hardware emulator. Presume this would work just as well?
Pretty much any device that emulates a disk drive should be fine.