The first half of this is the tricky part, from my experience. Z8 story files already push (or exceed!) the limits of a lot of older machines.
Hyperlinks wouldn’t be too hard (they could be an extension to the Z-machine without much trouble), but I’m not sure how much demand there is for them.
My top wish is to improve mobile UI support, especially improving support for multiple UI tabs. Look at Hadean Lands for iOS, which has a separate tab for the Map and the Journal (with a hierarchical menu for rituals, formulas, and facts).
Compare with Counterfeit Monkey for Frotz, which tries to take up the left half of an already-narrow screen to show the map, and uses a text-based UI (TUI) to display menus.
(note that Frotz doesn’t even support the current iPhone X screen sizes; it letter-boxes the screen on modern phones)
Tabs could help with all sorts of IF usability problems, even on desktop. An on-screen “Help” tab with “how to play” instructions, a “Hints” tab with invisiclues, a map… these would go a long way toward making parser IF accessible to newbies.
Also on-topic: it would be really cool to have a mobile-first IDE (especially for hypertext and choice-based IF), something that scales up to a tablet/desktop format rather than something designed desktop-first that scales down to try to make everything fit on a phone.
This is a good topic for discussion 
Having tried to get old tools working, I find that the biggest problem is when projects aren’t open source and/or present in a public place. Another problem is when you can find source code, but you can’t easily find instructions on how to actually perform a build (inform 5.5, I’m looking at you). Yet another problem is when there isn’t necessarily an authoritative single source for finding the tool, which makes any changes you make hard to find for people.
Often, the bulk of the time it takes is spent on searching and finding information about the projects, rather than actually making improvements. That’s not unusual for software development though.
It might be a good place to look. I would still much prefer a system that permits the use of a modern library, Vorple-like capabilities, etc.
One thing I really like about AXMA is the UI is automatically mobile friendly (although an author can thwart it somewhat through poor game design.).
The menu bar and image window remain on the side until the screen scales down, at which point the menu bar reconfigures across the screen bottom and images show full screen and can be dismissed and viewed again with a new corner button that appears. Singular links coded on lines by themselves become tap-friendly buttons. Also text resizing is built in to the UI by default.
Here’s the 6.1 manual (in the system) for comparison.
You can compile to Z-machine version 6 with ZILF or (I believe) Inform 6, giving you a modern library, but I’m not sure the Amiga/Apple II/anything from that time period could handle the full complexity of modern Javascript and CSS effects (which is what Vorple provides). That’s not a limitation of the language, but of the machine itself.
I didn’t know present-day ZILF could do that. Nor did I realize that z6 was possible, although I’m unsure of how to actually furnish I6 with the instructions necessary to embed graphical elements. So the prospect of developing on those premises makes me leery: it seems an awful lot of work for what will most likely not yield a satisfactory result.
And as for the Amiga, no, all the capability of JS/CSS is obviously out, simply because JS and CSS (and running-in-browser) imposes significant overhead. This is precisely what I wanted to avoid: I’m critical of relying on a Vorple-type browser-based solution precisely because it requires unwieldy workarounds to accomplish that which should be doable natively.
What I meant by Vorple-like capability was things like drawing a basic layout, adding static graphic sidebars, using hyperlinks, blitting images onto the screen, playing music, et cetera. All things easily within the capabilities of a typical A500 and, equally important to me, things that shouldn’t bloat executables for a modern machine to the point where I have to apologize for sending people a one-room game because the download took twenty minutes.
Ah, I see what you mean. I think Z6 is what you want, then: it can do all those things except hyperlinks.
I’m pretty sure that to do anything useful with V6 in Inform6, some library work will be necessary. When I have some time after the long-awaited overhaul of Frotz is done, I’ll look into it. I suppose I’ll start with examining how it was done in ZIL, looking at the resulting assembly, and try doing something in assembly within Inform6. Then I can try building some wrapper code around that.
The IF Archive has at least one example of doing V6 graphics with Inform, with source code, though I don’t think it uses the parser.
There’s also the ZIL source code for Zork Zero et al, on GitHub.
Vorple - https://vorple-if.com/ - integrates with Inform 6 and/or 7 to provide graphics capabilities.
Jeff
Not in a way practical for use on a 30 MHz system, to say nothing of my ideal spec (7.1 MHz and 1 MB RAM).
I don’t think anybody has said it, but Zoom is going to need to be updated too: https://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/
If anyone attempts this, this Github fork of Zoom that at least compiles on modern macOS might be a starting point.
On the Amiga, Aegis’ Visionary had a parser and graphic capability. The parser wasn’t up nearly Z-machine standards, but you could do quite a bit with it considering the the times. (Thanks to the Amiga’s copper, you had a low-res picture up top, and the higher-res text down below).
Odd that there isn’t a similar simple presentation here in the halcyon days of the 21st Century. I’d love a simple presentation like that in an interpreter.
One suggestion may be Inform 7 with the Location Images extension.
I believe it requires Flexible Windows also which requires some hoop-jumping as I recall. You could just include images inline with the text using Inform 7’s built in support for figures.
http://inform7.com/book/WI_23_1.html
