Source code to infocom's text adventure engines released (zcode interpreters)

Re:Source code to infocom's text adventure engines released ... by poutinepapi on Saturday November 18, 2023 @10:24PM (#38328398)

My dumbass opened up this repo full of hope and then realized I can't read any of this XD, I trained in the early 2000s, my first language was Java, I'm pampered as all hell.

The last time I saw assembler was in a bloody history class :P

Mind you, old school game developers were absolute gangsters and gave 0 shits about anything except things working and that's what I appreciates about them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Source code to infocom's text adventure engines released ... by cmrdporcupine on Saturday November 18, 2023 @10:26PM (#38328413)

Assembler isn't hard to write.

It's just bloody hard to read, unless you wrote it, and wrote it recently. You effectively have to have the state of the register set in your mind the whole time.

Lots of C code from back then is just as impenetrable though. It has structure but it's terse and mechanical. Everyone rolling their own lists and hash tables and string functions in every program, lots of unrolled loops, etc. Different constraints. Memory & CPU was expensive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Source code to infocom's text adventure engines released ... by pjmlp on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:56AM (#38331042)

You can start by learning JVM bytecodes [0], and play around with Jasmine[1].

Even today many cool performance tricks require understanding the bytecodes of the underlying language runtimes.

[0] - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/

[1] - https://jasmin.sourceforge.net/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Source code to infocom's text adventure engines released ... by poutinepapi on Sunday November 19, 2023 @06:25AM (#38331606)

Ahhh mate cheers! I had never seen Jasmin, I'll definitely take a look.

[ Parent | on HN ]