Status Line v3

I'm happy to say that development on Status Line v3 has begun. When I say "begun" I actually mean, "I've been working on it for a couple of weeks now and hit a milestone."

"Spider and Web", a z5 classic, ran and played last night without trouble. czech.z5, a game file that tests z-machine correctness, played to completion with 0 failed tests. There is still *a lot* left to do, but these encouraging successes have me feeling much more positive that I'll be able to get this to work within Pico-8's constraints.

Note! My experience last night showed that z5 games process more slowly than z3 and z4 games, and I imagine newer game files written in Inform 7 and higher will work, but push the Pico-8's limited processing power fairly hard. I'll do what I can to improve performance (probably in a v3.1 update) but even classic machines can struggle with z-machine performance; this is (it could be said) part of the "retro charm" of the platform?

Status Line Classics v2

The "Status Line Classics" are source-modified ports of Infocom games to fit the limitations of Status Line on the Pico-8. Most notably, text is reformatted and drawing routines are modified to accomodate the narrow screen. Beauracracy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, and Nord & Bert all received extra care to look great on the little system that could.

As before, it is my intention to "port" Infocom z5 games to the Pico-8. Latter games in the Infocom library used graphics, sound effects, and large screen space to expand the interactive fiction genre. Some of these features can be achieved on the Pico-8, some of these cannot. My biggest personal challenge is getting Beyond Zork onto the Pico-8. A fools errand perhaps, but I've designated myself as the fool to try doing it.