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).

Comments

Anyone else feel like they're having a stroke?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this word salad?

Text based adventure as a boot option?

[bejiitas_wrath]

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.

Thanks for that summary

[Brucelet]

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.