Z-machine
Sign in to saveThe Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system.
Article
10 sectionsContents
- History and design
- Nomenclature and conventions
- Before Z-machine
- ZIL and ZIP, ZILCH and ZAP
- Graham Nelson and ''Inform''
- ZIL (Zork Implementation Language)
- Interpreters
- See also
- References
- External links
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system.
==History and design== ===Nomenclature and conventions=== The "Z" of Z-machine stands for Zork, Infocom's first adventure game. Infocom used file extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), but the latter clashed with the widespread use of .zip for PKZIP-compatible archive files starting in the 1990s, after Activision had closed Infocom.