Posted March 21, 2022 by Christopher Drum
#Status Line #z-machine #Infocom #Interactive Fiction
(Status Line Classics editions shown)
Hand-crafted, custom builds of Infocom classics from original source designed to work great in Status Line.
See below for Status Line Classics!
tl;dr: visit my GitHub repository to download custom builds of some Infocom classics. Note: when updates to the z4 game files (not to be confused with Status Line updates) are published in the future, save games will not transfer from a previous build to the new build.
ntl;wr (not too long; will read)
All of the above under "Game-Specific Notes" is true for those playing the original z4 releases. However, I took it upon myself to investigate the original source code for the games listed above and have hand-crafted customized builds which accomodate Pico-8's small, adorable screen.
I need it to be known, first and foremost, that I approach modifications to the original Infocom games with reverance and care. I do not do anything to modify the main corpus, except where the formatting exceeds the boundaries of Status Line's screen. Even then, I put care into ensuring a visually pleasant layout is presented that maintains the flavor and spirit of the original presentation.
This meant going back to play the originals on the Amiga and seeing how the presentation looked, or even (in the case of Trinity's quotations) going back to the original poet's work to see how it was written/formatted. Hanging punctuation, adjusted hyphenation, columnar alignment, and more was scrutinized pixel-by-pixel. In the end of course these are all subjective decisions, but I do want to put minds at ease that I strove to be a good care-taker of the originals. All I'm interested in is putting in the minimal change necessary to adapt the classics for a new generation of machines.
While this first release of the modified games focuses exclusively on Status Line and the Pico-8's unique screen size, the long-term goal is to make these games generally accomodate a wider variety of screen sizes. To my mind, this is simply "game preservation."
Visit my github to find .z4 files to download, to report layout bugs, or even make your own contribution to the project.
During the course of this project, I discovered that the existing source code to Bureaucracy does not build a playable game. This was due to two factors:
Thanks to the amazing (and super fast) work by Jesse McGrew and @heasm66, Bureaucracy is now buildable and playable from source code. Chalk one up to game preservation!
I believe this Status Line Classic edition is the first and only playable release of the existing source code in public distribution. (other builds are available, but the source to those builds does not exist)
The project is getting complex enough now that I need to get its versioning under control. I've committed every version from 1.0 to 2.0 into github, and that will be the place to grab the source code from now on.