The Visible Zorker visualizes Zork data files #VintageComputing #Gaming #ReverseEngineering

Andrew Plotkin just released a tool handy for anyone looking through Zork files: The Visible Zorker.

The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.

Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That’s all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.

And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code — the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it’ll show you that code in context.

nfocom’s games are among the best-researched works in videogame history. The Z-machine format has long since been documented. The games have been disassembled and analyzed. And then, in 2019, we got their original ZIL source code.

But most players have never read this stuff. What if I built a way to visualize the Z-machine as it executed? I think of it as a kind of exploratory programming. It’s on the code-reading side rather than code-writing — but reading code is so much of software development!

Read more in the post here.


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