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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).

5 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Not the grue! by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Funny

    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

    1. Re:Not the grue! by RivenAleem · · Score: 5, Funny

      Grue Screen of Death

  2. Like in the old days. by cheetah_spottycat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Question by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because he can.
    And, more importantly, because you can't.

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  4. Transcript by jabberw0k · · Score: 5, Funny

    > BOOT
    Your way is blocked by a tall, bald pirate.
    > KILL PIRATE
    With what, your bare hands?
    > INVENTORY
    You have:
    One hard disk drive, /dev/hda
    One CDROM drive, /dev/cd0
    One USB drive, /dev/sda
    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
    >