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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.
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.
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)
I agree. The text-based adventure games are much more fun. The cyberspace equivalent of the Theater of the Mind.
I loved the Fortran-based MIT Adventure. I still have the source code of the version ported to Control Data Cyber mainframes that was floating around the lower-tier (not UC) California state universities, all of whom had Cybers, in the 1980's. I'll probably port it to C one of these days for shits and giggles one of these days so I can relive my undergrad days a bit.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Someone do this, I loved playing the text-based adventure games as a kid. Someone should bring these back.
If only there was a way to search for things like that on the Internet...
No sig today...
Because he can.
And, more importantly, because you can't.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If you type 'bing' into the google, you get taken to a site that can search for things like that.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
> 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
>
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.