Building a Z-Machine in the worst possible language – Whitebeard's Realm

5 hours ago

The Z-machine was a virtual machine developed by Infocom in the early 1980s to enable text adventure games to run on multiple architectures, reducing compilation efforts.
Despite Elm's pure functional nature, which made implementing the Z-machine's direct memory access challenging, it was successfully used to create a working Z-machine.
The author created an Elm-based Z-machine library with a clean interface for stepping and handling events, allowing for client experiments like if-pal.
Key functions in the library include ZMachine.load for loading games and ZMachine.runSteps for executing instructions with a maximum step limit.
The StepResult type manages different states like Continue, NeedInput, NeedSave, NeedRestore, Halted, and Error, facilitating user interaction and error handling.
OutputEvent types such as PrintText, NewLine, and ShowStatusLine handle game output, making it easy to build interactive fiction clients.
An example node.js/elm app using the library with Zork1 is available in the repository, providing a foundation for creating custom Infocom clients.

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