parchment VS inform

This is a fun one I played recently about shopping in a grocery store, called Aisle. You only have a single command you can give for the whole game, but there's a looot of them you can provide, and it gives you a different ending for each. Part of the fun is trying to figure out what you can say to find another ending. You can play it directly at the link below.

Play: https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2F...

Paste any of those URLs into https://iplayif.com for a modern web interpreter.

it's a mobile browser based on chrome and while I don't use it for this, I find it acceptable enough, actually better than the mobile chrome in my phone for some things, like https://iplayif.com/ which runs much better on it thanks to a generous virtual screen than on small screen sharing space with a virtual keyboard...

This article is interesting as it seems "the long way around": the Z-Machine is rather well documented, and already has VMs for the web [1] and going to the ZIL source to build a port of the ZIL itself rather than to interpret the Z-Machine binary is cool, I suppose, but ignores decades of insights into the Z-Machine.

While I'm being a downer, also need to point out that while the Internet Archive has archived the ZIL source code the Zork games are still under copyright and owned by Activision Blizzard (soon/now Microsoft). Using Zork itself as a deployment artifact is a possible way to get sued even if you think the game "abandonware".

[1] The best known/maintained is Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment

Are you using the latest version of Parchment? The version that ships with the official I7 packages is very old. Updating might address your issue, but I don't know.

Inform 7 is the most popular IF engine. The best place to download it in 2023 is from GitHub: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Releases can currently be found via this link: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Did you know Inform is now (finally) open source?! https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Inform 6 is still being developed, and Inform 7 went open source earlier this year: https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Here's the github repo, it was just open sourced last week. You can compile it from source now, and I imagine the UI frontends will be updated in a couple of weeks. IIRC, compiling directly to other languages is now possible, although I'm not sure how much that impacts your use case.

For those who don't know it, Inform 7 is the venerable "design system" for interactive fiction. It has been freely available for some time with the promise of a release as open source for some time now. Looks like that has happened.