.zxzvm

A Z-machine interpreter for esxDOS, letting a divIDE/divMMC-equipped Spectrum play Infocom text adventures (Zork, etc.) and modern Inform-compiled interactive fiction directly from story files on the DivMMC filesystem. It is Bob Fossil's esxDOS port of John Elliott's original ZXZVM, which targeted the +3 (and PCW/ResiDOS) disk systems; the esxDOS port brings the same interpreter to a 128K machine with a DivIDE or DivMMC interface instead of a +3.

Usage

.zxzvm <path-to-story-file>

A sample story file to try it with is Sean Barrett's freeware game Heroes, linked from the author's own announcement (nothings.org/games/if/heroes/).

Requirements

• 128K Spectrum (+2/+2A-class banked memory; this is a 128K-class interpreter, not a 48K one).
• DivIDE or DivMMC interface running esxDOS.
• Story file in .z3/.z5/.z8-style Z-machine format, readable from the esxDOS filesystem.

Notes / behaviour

• The distribution also ships two BPLUGINS (Z3, Z5) under BIN/BPLUGINS/ — small "SNA file plugin" stubs that let a snapshot browser hand off .z3/.z5 files to zxzvm. These plugins need DivMMC extended memory; the base .zxzvm command itself runs without it. ZXZVM was tested against esxDOS 0.87/0.88 with some reported trouble on those versions, per user reports on the esxDOS forum.
• Upstream ZXZVM (the +3 original by John Elliott) does not implement UNDO, Unicode, colour control, or Blorb; nothing suggests the esxDOS port adds any of these, so treat the same limits as applying here.
• Distributed as source-plus-binary; the upstream author's page states modifications must be redistributed with source, i.e. a copyleft term, though no formal license file was found bundled with this esxDOS build.

Provenance

Binary is BIN/ZXZVM (589 bytes) from ZXZVM_test2.zip, hosted on Bob Fossil's own site (thefossilrecord.co.uk), the same zip linked from his esxDOS-port announcement post and from the Spectrum Computing forum thread on ZXZVM. Tracked upstream at v0.01/v0.02/v0.03 in the esxDOS "almost complete" dot-command list; this build reports as v0.03, the latest tracked.

Credits

• esxDOS port: Bob Fossil (thefossilrecord.co.uk)
• Original ZXZVM: John Elliott (seasip.info/ZX/zxzvm.html)