This is the spec for Glulx, a three-operand 32-bit #virtual-machine designed by #Andrew-Plotkin aka Zarf, one of the leading #interactive-fiction authors as a simpler and less limited replacement for the #Z-machine, with Huffman string compression, integer and floating-point math, a standardized savegame format, no built-in object tree, and a dynamically-allocated heap. #toread
on 02016-04-29Gostak, the #interactive-fiction story (of #video-games) where all the words are made up, in the Parchment DHTML #Z-machine engine.
on 02016-04-27#runes are baked into the #Z-machine #virtual-machine spec as part of “font 3”
on 02016-04-27Seems like the #Z-machine #virtual-machine requires savegames to be in a different format from story files (programs), because the story files can’t include a suspended call stack, and savegames must.
on 02016-04-26Interesting, Infocom tried to use the #Z-machine #virtual-machine as a database engine called Cornerstone. #history
on 02016-04-26part of the latest version of the Zork #Z-machine #virtual-machine spec. Interesting to note that they’re scaling string and routine addresses by 4 or 8 (thus imposing alignment constraints!) in order to make the best of their 16-bit addresses.
on 02016-04-26the Zork #Z-machine #virtual-machine #ISA architecture had JSish property lists (albeit with 5-bit property IDs) for the objects (“Things”) in the game, which were organized into a rigid but mutable containment tree; they were mutable and not pageable, but program code was immutable and consequently pageable.
on 02016-04-26