It's more remake spam from me: today, the "G.U.E. on 9 Zorkmids a Day" leaflet originally bundled with Zork 2.
This was a fun one to work on, with an interesting layout, loads of lovely illustrations and the usual quirky and amusing writing.
As usual, PDF and PNG downloads are available on Google Drive, or via my website gnusto.au
Share it, remix it, do whatever. A credit is always nice. Enjoy!
hey everyone,
I am a fan of retro games and I just wanted to build something cool with Fable so I attempted building a UI around Zork. Zork is a old text based game (1981), which basically had no UI at all. I did start the project with Opus, but for the pixel art scenes, Fable was able to output something way beyond what Opus was capable of.
I did post it as a comment on another user game yesterday but I am taking the plunge to bring a bit more light to it:
No server, all front-end, no analytics tracking.
Just a quick one: with the recovery of now-dormant "The Zork Library" fansite now very robust, I've gone ahead and mirrored it on my own website. You can check it out at gnusto.au/projects/tzlmirror
Some files that were too large for my (free) hosting having been moved off-site to my Google Drive, but the links should still point to the right place.
Please feel free to have a poke around and note anything that seems busted in the comments. Expect broken download links from time-to-time, but most or all images should now be intact, especially in the Encyclopedia.
I'm running Return to Zork in Boxer, and I'm having a weird sound issue.
I used my original CDROM disc to install it. But whenever I play it, I get this horrible static/distortion noise after videos play, and it will stop when I go to a new screen or another video plays. But it will start again later.
I have tried setting boxer at 386, 486, Pentium, and Max speeds. But if I set it too fast, I get scratches/skips in the music.
I have tried a Sound Blaster 16 setup, and a Roland MT-32 set up.
I have tried playing from my ISO rip, and my BIN/CUE rip.
Nothing seems to fix it.
Anyone have any tips?
I don't remember this being an issue on my old computer, so I don't remember what to do.
TIA
UPDATE: I got it fixed. Reinstalled it and chose Sound Blaster Pro instead of 16. Don't know why but it seems to have issues with a 16 even though it's an option. But the 16 was relatively new at that point, so it makes sense.
But yeah, once I set it to the pro, it got rid of the distortion, and helped improve the skipping noise a little as well.
It was recently brought to my attention that The Zork Library, a fansite dating back decades (and probably the premiere Zork fansite, period) hasn't yet returned to active service after some downtime. With the Zork fanbase aging and interest waning, it's entirely possible the site isn't coming back this time.
So I thought I'd look at the viability of recovering the site from the snapshots made by The Internet Archive/The Wayback Machine. What I've managed to get via a variety of methods is around 4,400 files.
EDIT: Thanks to the incredible foresight of user QuailRider43, it now looks as if the Encyclopedia section is complete! With the addition of their 2018 backup, we've gone from just over 1000 images and misc supplemental files to well over 4000, which is likely to be the entire set. Huge thanks to QuailRider43 for helping to ensure this incredible fandom resource is preserved!
TZL_recovery_v3.zip
You'll want to run it in a Python local web server for everything to display correctly.
This is by no means the entire site. The main attraction is the incredibly exhaustive Encyclopedia Frobozzica, from which many images are still missing; maybe even most images. As best I can tell, a lot of images were simply never cached by The Internet Archive. However, it does appear that most or all of the actual pages have been recovered. The other major victim is the custom version of the Hotel New Zork mini-site, which is missing most of its content. There's other sources for this mini-site, but the TZL version was heavily customised to do away with its overly complex original design.
I've also had to use some automated processes to repair the links in the HTML files, which were modified when the site was cached. I've done some light testing and it seems to be working correctly, but I'm sure there's issues I've not found.
Here's the most important thing: I'm not good at this. Before attempting this recovery, I'd never tried any of this before. I'm working it out as I go along, so it's very likely I'm making mistakes or just entirely doing it wrong. There may be more to recover that I wasn't able to get, so if you know how to do this stuff, I'd love to hear from you! Drop me a message in the comments or send me a DM.
About a year ago I created a Z-Machine ported engine in Godot. Then I came across this [awesome post](Play Z3 games with auto-mapping on your Mac! : zork) by u/djducat, where he added an automapper. Since he wrote it in swift there were no plans to release it for Android so that's when I stepped in.
UI changes that I had added to the Z-Machine are a hint button (can be turned on in settings) that show valid directions and objects you can interact with, all nouns are highlighted and can be clicked on to examine, other interactions you will have to type manually, a search feature that will take you to that exact message, multiple saves, an undo system, and font size/color setting.
These were all quality of life changes I felt these Z3 games drastically needed. If I had more space like a tablet I'd add a few verbs you could click as well but just not enough space on Android.
I had most of these UI additions already done, I felt like they were all things that could slightly bring these games into a better more modern UI system. But honestly the mapping function was something I had never thought of so massive kudos to u/djducat for the idea.
I have only tested it with a few of these games, and I have not gone through every single path with every single one so if you do come across specific bugs let me know. I've tried to work around some of the old known bugs in some of these systems but some still alude me.
Anyways I hope you enjoy these UI updates.
Google Play Link: Xyzzy: Interactive Fiction - Apps on Google Play
The Zork Library web page is no longer working, and I'm curious if anyone happens to have the png that was listed under the History of Zork page for Appendix II, called "Ages of Zork"? I'm going through the original document and working on a sort of fancy-looking version of it and I sort of need that to complete it in the end. If anyone can help, I appreciate it!
Almost forgot to share these. Prior to the more familiar black-and-white maps we all know, the Zork Users Group released a set of illustrated maps. Structurally they're identical (which was great news, as I'd already recreated the actual map part) but with tons of great hand-drawn illustrations added.
These were recreated in much the same way as my earlier maps. At the download link there's a clean, vector-based PDF version, as well as versions with colour and texture applied to match the originals.
Google Drive downloads are HERE, or you can find them on my website, Gnusto.au
