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From: "John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: Z-Machine in PHP?
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 09:06:53 -0400
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Sascha Mller <newsbot@saschamueller.com> wrote:
>I just found this site:
>http://thcnet.net/error/index.php
>Here you can play Zork online. It doesn't need any Java or other plug-ins.
>The command input is done by a simple HTML form and JavaScript. All that is
>sent to the PHP script is the command the player enters.
>Now I wonder which program is used on the server. Since important
>abbreviations like "x" are not understood, it probably is no hack of a well
>known interpreter.

Abbreviations are part of the game, rather than the
interpreter.  Unless the interpreter supports them as
aliases, or something, that is.

>Does anybody know how it is implemented? It would be very cool to have a
>Z-Machine interpreter in PHP (or Phyton or such).

Well, if you read the leaflet (*always* read the
literature in Zork, because it actually tells you
things, though nothing related to the game...),
you'll see that it's the C translation of the
mainframe Zork (a.k.a. "Dungeon"), from around
1991, probably straight from the archive with some
code to let PHP "call" into it.

As for an actual Z-Machine, there's an in-progress
implementation in Python, whose name I can't
remember, but I'm sure someone else will remind me/
us.

Actually, I suppose I could just look it up, rather
than being all lazy...

Oh.  There are two, just on SourceForge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyzzy/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/viola/

at varying stages of development.

There's also the ever-popular Zplet for the JVM.
