31–38 of 38 posts
Also, instead of Z-Machine games, try writting Inform6 code, the games are highly modular and OOP oriented so creating something understandable can also be made without even an AI, just premade phrases with cliché settings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember weirdness in c64 games because of tape errors. I remember playing tusker and it was like it was haunted. Main character changed colour and disappeared entirely, hud elements turned Eldritch between game screens. It was wonderful
I had a corrupted save of Ultima III for the C64 on a disk. The game worked normally, but the world data had been corrupted into a bizarre mis-mash of all available terrain types and monsters. I kept that disk around and periodically loaded it just to fool around.
Fun. It's basically Borges Library of Babel [1] where each book is a 4K ROM! If you do the math based on the specs given in the story (and crucially, you assume that each possible book appears once) you end up with a library several times larger than the observable universe. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
https://libraryofbabel.info/ is inspired by that story and is a library of all combinations of 3,200 characters (well lowercase letters, space, comma and period)
I'm in awe.
When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error". Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game. To my surprise, the game started, but there was something…
The simplest 2600 games were just 2k in size not 4k. Combat for example, is a 2k rom. If you want to increase your chances of finding something but still generating a "complete" rom, then limit the size to 2k.
If 256 bytes is enough to code a demo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlW84fEHngM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-WjF_dxdHM I'd say gentlemen (m/f) start your random number generators
https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/
Ok, Lisp and Forth can bootstrap themselves from a small core, but still...
It would be cool to start with a random ROM image and then use a Monte Carlo technique (simulated annealing), making a set of random changes to the image by flipping bits, use the change in the "composite score" for the decision step in the MC iteration, and have your image "evolve" into something.
Repeat until one finds a game that is new!
Should only take a few ages of the universe. :-)