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Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan
I made standalone executables of the Zork trilogy, ported from original Infocom UNIX source to Cosmopolitan, are available for Windows/Mac/Linux/bsd for arm/x86 machines. These require no further installation nor external files to play.
Briefly put, Infocom text adventures were released as platform-independent game files which ran within platform-specific virtual machines for every system the company supported. An additional benefit of the APE’s .zip archive roots is that we can take things further and create self-contained executables which embed the z-machine and a game data file into one standalone package. I’ve spent so much time in the past getting $PATHs set up, putting libraries in the right place, installing dependencies, trying to get MSYS2 to behave, and more that to have the convenience of a single APE application unified across my machines was a feeling of, “Yes, this is how things should be.
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