I ported a Z-Machine to a Raspberry PI Pico. It’s a super low-end and low-cost microcontroller. It has no operating system.
When powering on, it shows the title screen in ~1 second.
It plugs in to a VGA monitor and a PS/2 keyboard. It’s instant text adventure.
Save and restore work using in game commands (one slot per game) and it uses the built-in flash memory. Effectively, it’s a text adventure appliance.
Anyone writing IF with Z-Machine code still?
Many, in fact! Two of the most popular systems for parser development (Inform and Dialog) compile to Z-machine out of the box. Most often, nowadays, people target post-Infocom versions of the machine (for the sake of having enough RAM), but there are also efforts such as PunyInform to fit games into early Z-machine versions for the sake of retro hardware.
Writing a Z-Machine/PunyInform game (sequel to Duck! Me?) right now.
Amazing work.
I’ve open sourced the project here.
Eric
