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Boot To Zork
Seemingly to inflict more suffering upon himself, Matthew Garrett (lord of getting things to boot using EFI) decided that booting directly into Zork would be cool. Quoting his weblog entry: "So, Frotz seemed like the natural choice when this happened. But despite having a set of functionality that makes it look much more like an OS than a boot environment, UEFI doesn't actually expose a standard C library. The EFI Application Development Kit solves this particular design decision. Porting Frotz ended up involving far more fixing up of Frotz bugs that tripped up -Werror than anything else. One note, though - make sure you include DevShell in the list of required packages at build time, otherwise file i/o will mysteriously fail."
Grab the code, assuming you have a copy of Zork (or any other Z-machine game, as long as you name it ZORK1.DAT, I think).
What is this word salad?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You only had to copy-paste correctly, not even type it.
Someone do this, I loved playing the text-based adventure games as a kid. Someone should bring these back. They had amazing graphics as you saw the world in your head. Nothing like the 1080p games they make now. But Zork is a classic and the ability to play it now is incredible. Pity that graphics now is the selling point instead of gameplay and story development.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
I think it's only fitting, keeping in mind, that in the old Amiga/Atari days, booting directly into your games was an absolutely normal thing to do - hardware resources were scarce, and the last thing you wanted was sharing RAM and precious CPU cycles with an OS running in the background.
Sounds like over-design yet having to patch around under-utility to me. As in, "we herd u liek OSes..." etc.
I still think something like OpenBOOT would've saved a lot of masochism here. Opinions? Discuss.
Never mind the Steambox, here comes the Zorkbox!
For bonus points, someone do this on a Raspberry Pi. :-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
These games are now typically called "Interactive Fiction"; there are LOTS of them, and they are still being developed. It's a small community, but active. Two good post-Infocom games are Bronze (by Emily Short) and Anchorhead (by Michael Gentry).
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
A gentle intro: http://emshort.wordpress.com/how-to-play/
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Of those actually mucking about in implementations, the most common complaint I've heard is that vendor implementation are too inconsistent. I cannot imagine the same people making that call have had experience dealing with x86 BIOS, which is a landmine of inconsistency vendor to vendor. Should an option rom hookn int18? will hooking int19 be catastrophic? Does the vendor implement BBS or not? How should you leave the stack on exit to assure that subsequent boot devices are not hosed?
I'm not happy with everything in UEFI (mostly because it follows a lot of microsoft design guidance (executable format, ucs-2, microsoft function calling conventions), but the ability to associate functions with existing devices is exceptionally handy. For example in network device world, in BIOS the network card vendor would have to provide the full PXE implementation up to dhcp and tftp. In UEFI, the network card vendor is best off publishing only the low level interface, and then code from other people can hook ip stacks that are independent of the network hardware. It means that switching network vendors leads to less inconsistency in network boot behavior.
Another thing that's nice is the standardized interface between OS and firmware. The EFI variable space is nice. It falls short though of adequately supporting configuration, meaning it retains proprietary tools to configure firmware from OS that vary vendor to vendor.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What is it with people and mjg59's name? It's Matthew Garrett. It has a hew and an extra t.
Because he can.
And, more importantly, because you can't.
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I had the Zork games, never could finish them even with the paperback book cheat guides, damn they were just hard. Long load times on the Commodore 64 made it even more of a pain. Had much more success with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text game. The surprise humor in them made me want to play it, Zork was rather dull and drab in comparison.
I thought it was pretty dorky already when I had a communal PXE boot into Arkanoid - simply loads a 1440KB MS-DOS 7.10 .img with the game and an autoexec.bat that launches the cutemouse driver, the game, and then a REBOOT.COM program. You had to type 'arkanoid' at the : prompt though, else the default was to boot as a LTSP thin client.
But you could run it from any thin client, regular computer and even dead computers (unstable, dead hard drive, dead controller etc.)
That was a script kiddie job though (down to donwloading REBOOT.COM rather than making it myself but duh, it's not like typing a one-liner with COPY CON and feeding it to a program called MASM or FASM would have made me smarter. I did fail at booting DOS from iSCSI though, so I must suck. I wanted to run networked doom2 that way, with a universal packet driver.
Dunno why booting Zork from UEFI is so awesome, when UEFI setup program have mouse and graphics support. But it's cool. I don't understand the bitching about C library though, why not just write a DOS clone in less than 4096 bytes and run the DOS version of Zork?, or boot CP/M 86 and run Zork in that.
Dunno what UEFI can do either. With BIOS, PXE, iPXE, VGA or VESA you can already do universal high res graphics and networking, but sorely missing is sound, barring PC speaker or an automatic passthrough of PC speaker sound through the mobo's jack. The worst thing ever is when Sound Blaster emulation was "trusted" by Creative Labs, who bought Ensoniq ONLY so that sound blaster emulation under DOS could stay proprietary to them under threat of lawsuit. (even then I think you would get general midi but not adlib). If a workaround can be written I will be SO much grateful (other that buying a socket 1155 motherboard with ISA slot)
> BOOT /dev/hda /dev/cd0 /dev/sda
Your way is blocked by a tall, bald pirate.
> KILL PIRATE
With what, your bare hands?
> INVENTORY
You have:
One hard disk drive,
One CDROM drive,
One USB drive,
A rather large magnet
A DVD containing LinuxMint
> EXAMINE HARD DRIVE
The disk appears to contain a bootable copy of Windows 8.
> ATTACK PIRATE WITH MAGNET
The pirate parries, and your magnet hits the hard disk drive.
READ ERROR, SECTOR 0
>
The problem with searching the web for existence (or lack thereof) of a subject is that if the community has changed to a different synonym for the topic, you might end up misled by the dearth of recent results from searching on the term that is no longer in fashion. What used to be "Doom clones" are now first-person shooters, "DOTA clones" are now MOBAs, and "text adventures" are now interactive fiction. The synonym problem is the web's version of guess the verb.
Boot to CircleMUD?
Because he can. And, more importantly, because you can't.
I'd like to mod up the parent +5 Funny and +5 Insightful !
This is going to sound sarcastic, but in all sincerity, thanks, Slashdot, for posting a geeky story full or technical jargon. You used to be able to come here and find tons of stuff like this: obscure notes with enough confusing details to inspire you to go look something up and maybe even learn a thing or two. Good to know that News for Nerds still does occasionally happen.
Not really. It's running entirely sans-OS.
I asked a colleague for a connection to a database. He gave me a login to a MS Windows remote desktop.
I asked again. And he gave me a port and an IP address. I followed this down to where I wanted to go.. I could see where I needed to be. Open this door, unlock this puzzle. In my mind's eye I knew the path because I'd drawn the map.
I didn't need the visual metaphors that someone else had made. They were mere fantasies, imagined by minds that saw things the same way. Distractions. Illusions.
Give me the command line and my metaphors are my own.
It's dark down here.. and my sword is glowing blue.
This is not running an operating system, this is in efi the replacement to your bios.
EFI can do a lot of stuff, there is a text editor, interactive shell and python interpreter so it is something that you can write programs in not just operating system boot loaders.
I have installed this as a boot entry on my laptop and it does boot directly to zork in no time
Well, yea but, how can we make this Obama's fault?
So the EFI in this case is an OS.
Zork cannot manage hardware, nor execute programs, and since the EFI is doing this is is just a slimmed down OS.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You cannot run without a OS, something has to manage the hardware and execute programs. And that thing that does that (here is a hint, Zork is not doing this) is the OS.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And those functions not provided by EFI are being added to the binary. EFI is not an OS, it's more like a BIOS. Unless you're going to be extremely loose with definitions.
Would this image work on a raspberry pi?
I understood the title without having to read TFS, where's my trophy?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I like the quote I saw on someones sig.
"It's pitch black, you are likely to be shot by Vin Diesel."
Combining the Zork statement of the VD movie.
I always think a movie should be made out of Zork.
I don't know how it would be done but it sounds cool.
Even though it is based on a game I might like it.
Ominous red eyes staring out from darkness just waiting for the light on your torch to flicker out.
Plus it wouldn't need much action, more cerebral.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
By any and all definitions, as far as I am aware.
"Noun
The software that supports a computer's basic functions, such as scheduling tasks, executing applications, and controlling peripherals."
The the BIOS executes at least one program (normally THE OS, in this instance Zork), and controls a computers basic functions and peripherals (input/output), as well as abstracting and standardizing the use of the hardware.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It seems like you're saying in your definition that Zork takes the role of the OS. That's what I said.
You *can* run without an OS. For example, consider older computers where the software is usually run directly on the hardware. "Drivers" for the hardware aren't always separate enough to be identified (register manipulations being directly coded in the binary), there isn't necessarily a file system implemented, there's no process scheduling, no memory management beyond directly accessing areas of the memory map, etc. Basically, you can run a program that doesn't have any of the common features of an OS. Granted, I don't know the details of this specific program, but the possibility exists that it's just running on the bare hardware.
As an example, this "OS" just prints out "Hello world" by writing directly to the video hardware on a PC. I wouldn't really call it an "OS", though, even though it can run as the sole software on a modern computer.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Booting an embedded PPC system directly to Zork.
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