The Ancient Zork Collection
===========================

This collection contains the following games:

* Zork, 285 point version - an exact replica of the game made from a 
    snapshot of the MDL source code the way it looked on June 14, 1977.
    This replica was made in ZIL in 2021 by Henrik Åsman.

* Zork 1 Release 2, 1980 - the first public release.

* Zork 2 Release 7, 1981 - the first public release.

* Zork 1 Release 88, 1984 - probably the best release.

* Zork 2 Release 48, 1984 - probably the best release.

* Zork 3 Release 17, 1984 - probably the best release.

Zork 3 didn't change as much as the others - the initial release was more
mature and looked very much like the later releases. For this reason, the
initial release isn't included here.

The games are provided for Commodore 64 (d64 and d81), Commodore 128 (d71 
and d81), Commodore Plus/4 (d64 and d81), the MEGA65 (d81), and as regular
story files to be used with the Z-code interpreter of your choice. 

If you want the old-school experience and you play on an emulator or use a 
device such as SD2IEC which can handle d81 disk images, you probably want 
to use the d81 versions, since it's safe to use the game disk for saves 
as well when it's a d81 disk, so you don't need to swap disks when saving
or restoring the game state.


Brief history of Zork
=====================

The first version of Zork was developed by a few graduate students at the 
Dynamic Modelling Group at MIT in 1977. The authors had played Adventure and
really liked it, but thought they could make something even better. At times
it was called Dungeon, but this name was finally abandoned when they decided
to go commercial, in order not to risk being sued by the owners of the
Dungeons & Dragons trademark.

Zork was written in MDL, a Lisp-like language used at MIT. It was a big
program even for the mainframe PDP-10 they wrote it on, and way too big to
be run on any of the computers which were used in people's homes. In 1979
Joel Berez and Mark Blank designed a virtual machine called the Z-machine
("Zork Machine") - a virtual machine which Zork could be implemented in,
and which was easy enough to write an emulator for on home computers. They
split up Zork in three parts, while also changing and expanding the game.

In 1980, Infocom started selling the first part, Zork 1, for the popular home
computer TRS-80 Model 1. They started writing Z-machine emultators for more
machines, and released Zork 2 in 1981 and Zork 3 in 1982.

Zork 1 was one of the best selling games in the US for several years in the
first half of the eighties.


Z-machine emulators
===================

There are Z-machine emulators (AKA Z-code interpreters) for lots and lots of
different platforms, including dozens of 8-bit computers, all the popular
16-bit computers, and of course all modern computers. Some popular choices
for modern computers are Gargoyle, Frotz and Lectrote.

This collection uses a Z-code interpreter called Ozmoo, written in 2018-2021.
The base version can produce playable games for Commodore 64, Commodore 128,
Commodore Plus/4 and the MEGA65. The project home page is 
https://github.com/johanberntsson/ozmoo . The Ozmoo package can be installed 
on any modern computer, or it can be used online at 
http://microheaven.com/ozmooonline/

There is also a version of Ozmoo for BBC/Acorn 8-bit computers. It can be
found at https://zornslemma.github.io/ozmoo.html 

