Wow… that video is really great!
Thanks for the link.
<hands PoorYorick a Cardigan sweater and leads him over to the rocking chair on the porch where he can yell at kids for being in his yard>
I don’t want to call MC Frontalot a guilty pleasure, because there’s no guilt involved. Clever lyrics, great hooks, geeky subject matter.
I find it rather amusing that someone with the handle of “Yorick” is posting in a Zork thread.
(Seeing as how “Saint Yoruk” was one of the historical personalities in that universe.)
Somewhere at home I’ve got a box of “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” with about twenty different text adventures including the original Zork series, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and a bunch of murder mysteries I had never heard of before. I should try to burn all of those installation disks to a CD before they quit making floppy drives and I am no longer able to use them.
A few years ago we had a young lady on our team who was in her late 20’s and had never seen a 5 1/4" floppy disk. So to really freak her out, one day one of the senior members of the group brought in an old piece of core memory from a mainframe to show her. You know, one of those iron grids with the metal rings.
Then we told her to get off our lawn. 
I’m glad I wasn’t the only person to think of that.
Beware, I live!
I burned two motherboards playing zork on my old pcjr.
If you don’t want to use the command line or Stuffit Expander (and who could blame you for either of those), use The Unarchiver for files like that.
Not that it matters, though, if you’ve got an Intel Mac. Those Zork apps will only run under Classic, as one might expect for a file encoded in that format.
If you can get a hold of any original file published by Infocom, you can use a Z-machine interpreter, available here for Mac or just look down the sidebar for your OS here.
Of course, the Z-machine has a Javascript version, and you can play the Infocom Zorks in any Javascript-capable web browser here (save & restore not yet implemented, I don’t think).
Semi Hijack
Is Adventure available for free anywhere? Logic dictates that it is and that the magic word Pugh doesn’t work in the land beyond the chasm.
Before my hard drive crashed, I had a Z-machine interpreter (Z-shell? I forget) and pretty much all of the Infocom games, which I used to play on my parents’ Commodore. HHGTG, Zork, Planetfall … good times. I need to re-download it.
There’s new interactive fiction you can download too. Like a lot of free, user-written stuff, much of it is lousy and some of it is excellent. I wasted a lot of time my first year in law school on text adventures.
I’m blanking on the Mac interpreter that worked best but there is a pretty good one that runs all the files.
Related: the prior librarian at my Medical Library used a computer catalog she purchased in 1987. It looks like Pong (I remember Pong!). It used floppies. It was also a PITA.
I was having trouble getting it to work for me and I had lots of IT (for the hospital, not the company, which we could not find…*) “helping” me. One helper via phone flat refused to believe that I was using a program that used floppies.
Damned whippersnapper! <shakes cane>
I pitched the whole thing and went with an online catalog. It costs less than a dollar a day.
*apparently this company does still exist because I got a promo from them just last week. For over $1200, they will upgrade my (old) system… In their promo they say that “some new users are not familiar with the DOS look; this upgrade makes our system more user friendly” and they give an example:
Old way: Patron Name… (“DOS look”)
New way: <insert Windows box with flashing cursor here>
I about fell off my chair laughing. For over a 1K I get something that looks like 1994? It is to laugh.
Other tech anecdote: we used to have an old rotary phone in the basement. One day #1 son wanted to call a friend, but the cordless’ battery had died or something. I told him to use the downstairs phone. He looked at me blankly and asked, “How?” :smack:
I am very old 
Yes, it is. I know this because I have it downloaded on my laptop. Unfortunately I can’t remember where I got it, but it was only just a few months ago that I downloaded it. I’m sure a Google search would turn something up…
How I loved Zork. And built little maps on grid paper. Never completed it though, sigh.
Dark Castle- now that’s one worth remembering!
FWIW, this song has been my companion during this development phase.
Thanks again. The guy has some interesting stuff.
A number of years ago, I was stage managing a show set in the 1950s. The lead was a young man of about 16. He was flummoxed by two pieces of technology that he was required to use every night.
1 - The cooler mounted bottle cap opener. No you couldn’t just twist off the cap of your coke back then.
2 - The rotary dial pay phone. No, those little holes were not buttons, and you had to put your money in the phone, before you could make a call.
I’m 20 years old and I’ve never even seen a rotary phone in person.
Pysol is a really good program as well. I’ve got the original and haven’t tried the fork that has added even more games.
I admit, I kind of miss the golden age of text based games. To me, the difference between a text based game and a graphics-based game is like the difference between a book and a movie, one not necessarily better than the other. I know that this marks me as someone over forty.
I have a special place in my heart for Planetfall, the first text based game I actually completed.