Play Retro and Modern
Classic Text Adventures
on the Pico-8

Status Line enables the Pico-8 to run z-machine text adventures, a format made famous by the Infocom classics of the 70's and 80's, including the Zork Trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Trinity, and many more.

v3.0 of Status Line extends the library of compatible games into present day, with modern classics like Photopia, Lost Pig, and Curses.

Simply put, games in the .z3 / .z4 / .z5 / .z8 game format can be enjoyed in the "cozy space" of the Pico-8.

• NEW for v3!
  • Plays games in the .z3 / .z4 / .z5 / .z8 format
  • Full "EGA" color support in games that support it.
  • Games up to 512K (see Status Line SPLIT, below)
  • Timer support, for an authentic Border Zone experience
  • Completely redrawn bold and italic fonts
• Standard, bold, italic, and reverse text supported
• Save and restore your progress (see How to Use Status Line, below)
• Both beep AND boop sound effects!
• Multiple color themes to recreate that "classic feel"
• Multiple cursor types for fellow pedants

Getting Started

If you're brand-new to text adventures and how they play, you'll probably find it helpful to get a little introduction to the genre. Here's a handy guide for understanding the quirks and nuances that can often frustrate new players. Here's another great page with information for beginners.

When you launch Status Line, on-screen instructions explain, "Drag in a z3/4/5/8 game or a SPLIT1 file to start playing." Simply do as instructed. The game will load and begin. A SPLIT file will prompt you to drag in SPLIT2, then the game will start.

"MORE" will appear for extra-long text passages, giving you a chance to read everything before proceeding. Hit any key and the next page of text will scroll onto screen.

Preferences

At the title screen, hit the "Enter" key to open preferences. Color themes, scroll speeds, cursor styles, and in-game clock options are found there. Your selections will persist across each launch of Status Line.

Save/Restore

When you `save` your game, use whatever filename you wish.  For eample, you save a game of Enchanter with the name `bedroom`. Later, when you `Restore` you find something like `bedroom_32a7_save.p8l`.  Status Line has appended your chosen filename with additional information. Why?

All saved game files live in the same folder, the addition of the "identifier" ensures that different games don't overwrite one another's saves.

<your_filename>_<the current game identifier>_save.p8l. "p8l" being Pico-8's default file extension.

When `restoring` a saved game, Status Line will ask you to "Drag in a <identifier>_save.p8l file", and will open the default save folder for you. Drag-and-drop a save game with a matching identifier to load and continue playing. Keeping saved games in the default location will provide the most seemless `Restore` operation for you, though you can bring in save files from anywhere.

Compatibility

You will likely encounter games that exhibit one of the following problems

• Refuses to play with a message about the screen being "too small"
• Plays, but text is jumbled up

This is unavoidable in some cases, due to the Pico-8's very tiny screen size and my inability to engineer hacks for every game ever made. Two games in particular are absolutely not going to work properly: Words Get Twisted Round and Tumble Down (hardcoded for wide screens) and Beyond Zork (though there may be hope for the future)

Notes on Downloads

• Standalone executables do not require owning Pico-8 to run
• Windows and Mac users will likely get a security warning on first launch. This plagues any number of devs these days and I have no solution for it. If this is a deal-breaker, I totally understand.

In the days of the floppy, some games couldn't fit on a single disk. Games could be split across two, three. . . fifteen (?!) floppies at times. The retro aesthetic of the Pico-8 shares a similar limitation when importing files.

A .z8 game can be as big as 512K, however the Pico-8 only supports file imports of a maximum 256K. Lost Pig is 264K. Is the Pico-8 to be denied the glory of Lost Pig?!

Don't Panic™! Status Line SPLIT is now available! This is a simple, local-only, open-source (not much to see!), offline web utility for splitting .z8 game files over 256K into two, smaller files.

Status Line 3.0 recognizes and plays these split games, enabling an expanded universe of text adventures to enjoy.

Available right here on itch.io

While I have endevoured to provide the best possible user experience, the harsh reality is that some games do not format themselves nicely inside Pico-8's 32 characters x 24 lines of text.

To alleviate as much pain as possible, I publish Status Line Classics on my github page. For notable games with source code available, I modify the source code and provide bespoke builds which look and play great in Status Line.

Volume 1 ported Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It, and Bureauacracy over to our favorite fantasy console. They are, if I may say so, ADORABLE.

Volume 2 Now Available

• Infocom "Solid Gold" w/Invisiclues
  (the originals play fine if you don't like these!)
  
  • Zork 1
  • Planetfall
  • Leather Goddesses of Phobos
  • Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  • Wishbringer
• Border Zone
• Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
• Curses

It is important to note that if a game loads, it will play! You are not required to use these custom builds! However, you may see visual artifacts, like text cut off abruptly,  overlapping itself, or even a message in-game telling you it can't display something. These are unfortunate casualties of cramming a lot of text into a very tiny screen.

• The Interactive Fiction Database is worth exploring
• Interactive Fiction Archive offers a lot
• Check out The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog
• The Infocom classics are archived on GitHub
• There are even games here on itch.io

With Status Line 3.0 your options for writing a compatible game have greatly expanded! Note that while the Pico-8's computational speed exceeds the computers of the early 80's, it is not without limits! Games get progressively more difficult for Status Line to run at good speed with each version of the z-machine you target.

So, z3 games are your best bet. z5 plays really well. z8 games can be slow. I wrote a development blog post about why that is, but z8 games can and do run just fine!

PunyInform

For the best experience in Status Line I absolutely recommend PunyInform. It is a version of the Inform6 programming language optimized to perform well on vintage systems. With Ozmoo Online, you can even turn your game into a bootable C64 disk (as well as other systems)!

Inform7

The standard-bearer, and open-sourced in 2022. Most (?) modern parser-based interactive fiction is written using this language and its related tools. It can build games in the z8 format, which are fairly large and "heavy" (from a Status Line/retro perspective) but also offers a large community of support.

Dialog

I'm a bit hesitant to recommend this one, as the original creator ceased development some time ago, but it does produce compatible games and offers an interesting alternative to the other two systems in both program structure and distribution options. There are discussions on IntFiction.org to keep this project going.

Everything is on github

• Status Line (includes Status Line SPLIT)
• Status Line Classics (source and builds)