On 12/9/06, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Samuel,

For future releases can you put up a little description of what a Z Machine is in the email?

Hmm. That would probably be a good idea ;-). But I don't see why I can't do that now, too. Except I actually want to describe the Z-machine, because apparantly the Z machine is a big giant machine covered in what looks like lightning. Anyway, here is the description from Wikipedia: The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files, or Z-code files), and could therefore port all its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code (or developing some compiler for each system). And I'll also note that, since then, a lot of people have used Graham Nelson's Inform compiler to write their own "text adventure games" (or "interactive fiction", as they like to call it) for the Z-machine, many of which are available at the IF archive (ifarchive.org).