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Hello,

Did you know if Infocom games were available on the Dragons ?

I'm a big fan of the Zork games series, it would be great to play on a real machine !

I made some researches, looks like.. no

Thanks in advance if someone have some information.

Unfortunately Infocom never released any title for the Dragon. At the time there were not enough households with a Dragon plus a disc drive (the disc drives cost more than the computer itself, so only a small percentage of Dragon owners bought a drive) to make the market worthwhile for Infocom. Also Infocom was an American company and despite the appearance of the Tano Dragon, the computer had a negligible presence in America.

For a list (incomplete) of text adventures that were officially released for the Dragon, or in the odd case announced but not released, please check out the Classic Adventure Solution Archive (CASA for short).

Ok I see.

I understand now why the Zork games were very popular on Commodore/Atari and Apple machines...!

Thanks for the link, very interesting.

The safest bet now, as far as playing the "Infocom" games is concerned, might be to resort to emulation. I think I retrieved the whole range in Amiga format, many years ago...

I believe it should also be quite easy to play those online nowadays...
https://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/

An other way is actually to use a modern "interpreter" for these games.

Infocom created a virtual machine, the "Z-machine" to simplify the porting to the various range of 80's computers. The game file itself is the same on every machines, only a small executable (the "interpreter") is different for each machine.

Today, you can use software like WinFrotz or Gargoyle to run these games on modern computers, laptops, tablets, phones...

It's still possible today to create this kind of interactive-fiction games, (and compatible with the software above). Take a look at Inform 7 for example.

I am a writer since some years, all my games are playable online or offline, even on old computers. Unfortunately, it seems that no zmachine interpreters were made for the Dragon...

I've been looking into this and there are some Infocom games available for the CoCo (TRS-80 Colour Computer), a computer that is very similar to the Dragon. So I suspect it may be possible to port the CoCo zmachine interpreter to the Dragon.

I know that some Coco cartridges can work on the Dragon, but for the floopy games I don't know.... But it's a very interesting discovery !!

At least one game has already been ported... Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is available in the archive if you look in the disk Software section.

Does that mean we could potentially get the whole range of Infocom games running then?

Potentially yes - If you look at the HHGTTG game, I think the Z-Machine engine has been ported, so theoretically it should be possible.

Does anyone know how N.D.U.G. created their port of "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy"?