I ran calypso.z3, tristam_island.z3 and a few more Zmachine text adventures under an interpreter created in PostScript.
Also if I want I can cross-compile a static build of Frotz for Linux/Misc and emulate it under a RISC interpreter for Linux syscalls written in... Perl, runable in every modern Perl port out there. Linux/RISC binary under Perl for NetBSD/Vax? Yes. Slow? Not much, it's a text game in the end.
But, as for the ZMachine, you can run text adventures in Android,
Game Boy, Amiga, MSDOS, Windows, Palm PDA's... anything 8bit and up.
Also, damn Sokoban under Eforth written in Subleq, a VM which can just:
- set up a 2^16 RAM size
- single opcode: substract A from B, if less than 0, go to addr in C.
- A < 0? Get ASCII input in B
- B < 0? Put ASCII output in B
- C < 0? End
This, just this, and people wrote Subleq simulators in C, AWK, Python, TCL, FPGA's and whatnot. And it will run Eforth, and that means... you can write a
ZMachine interpreter on it and be really slow if emulated in a Pentium 4 (maybe 3/5 seconds per command with a ZMachine on top of Eforth for Muxleq instead of Subleq), but the game will be playable and a great exercise on Turing completeness.
If a Mandlebrot render under Muxleq+EForth (with no floats used, just integers) is as fast as a C64/Amiga with a native Forth. then having that tiny EForth+Muxleq is not that useless.
i’d love for this to be required by law. i’m probably not thinking of some great reason why that might be a bad idea, but it seems like an effective way to reduce e-waste.
ehhhh, i disagree partially. a less cynical take would be to call it “opinionated”.
any computer can be for “experts”, but that’s not the same as delivering something preconfigured and opinionated.
nobody has actually seen this thing in action yet, but in my head it’s hardware + some opinionated linux distro (i imagine something like omarchy) + support.
certainly not what everybody would want, but if there are people that enjoy configuring their systems then there’s people that don’t.
> My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend 100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.)
this struck me as weird. both in terms of “tinkering” being the most important thing to be doing, and then also describing “working like a surgeon” to be tinkering.
That isn't how analogies work--they are about partial similarities, not equivalence. The OP never says or implies that working like a surgeon is tinkering--allowing focus on the most important thing to be doing doesn't mean that the most important thing is the same for everyone.
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