Tyler August writes about eenk, a project that brings long-form text adventures'' think Zork with several novels' worth of prose' 'to palm-sized Xteink e-ink readers. Built on the ESP32 microcontroller and the ink scripting language, it ships with its own IDE (eenky) for authoring choose-your-own-adventure books and is released under an MIT license on GitHub.
- The X3/X4 use an ESP32-C3 with no PSRAM, giving developers less memory than 1980s home computers
- The X4 Pro variant uses an ESP32-S3 for more RAM and adds a touchscreen
- Commenters note Xteink sells identical hardware through different channels with different software configurations (locked vs. unlockable)
- A commenter suggests packaging the project as a Crosspoint plugin rather than a standalone firmware to avoid repeated reflashing
- The X3/X4 use an ESP32-C3 with no PSRAM, giving developers less memory than 1980s home computers
- The X4 Pro variant uses an ESP32-S3 for more RAM and adds a touchscreen
- Commenters note Xteink sells identical hardware through different channels with different software configurations (locked vs. unlockable)
- A commenter suggests packaging the project as a Crosspoint plugin rather than a standalone firmware to avoid repeated reflashing
Infocom, the legendary studio behind text adventures like Zork, faced financial decline following a failed attempt to diversify into business software with their 1985 database program, Cornerstone. While intended to leverage their virtual machine technology, the software was notoriously slow and struggled against IBM-compatible systems. Now, thanks to new work by developer TaradinoC, an interpreter called Linchpin allows this obscure piece of software to run on modern PCs.
A repository containing the source code for the Infocom game Zork I, written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language). It includes various files used in the development of the game and is intended for educational and historical purposes.
Learn about interactive fiction and the Z-Machine with this guide, covering history, tooling, and creating your own text adventure game.
This article discusses the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab's 'Tourist Policy' and how it impacted students' access to its resources. As a high school student in Maryland, the author shares their experience of using the lab's PDP-10s over the ARPANET and how it inspired them to learn and contribute to the MIT community.
