Andrew Plotkin just released a tool handy for anyone looking through Zork files: The Visible Zorker.
The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.
Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That’s all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.
And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code — the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it’ll show you that code in context.
nfocom’s games are among the best-researched works in videogame history. The Z-machine format has long since been documented. The games have been disassembled and analyzed. And then, in 2019, we got their original ZIL source code.
But most players have never read this stuff. What if I built a way to visualize the Z-machine as it executed? I think of it as a kind of exploratory programming. It’s on the code-reading side rather than code-writing — but reading code is so much of software development!
Read more in the post here.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is the newest Raspberry Pi computer, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 5 better than the 4? How about a faster processor, USB 3.0 ports, and an updated Gigabit Ethernet chip with PoE capability? Good guess – that’s exactly what they did!
The Raspberry Pi 5 is the latest product in the Raspberry Pi range, boasting 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz with built-in metal heatsink, USB 3 ports, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, faster Gigabit Ethernet, and PoE capability via a separate PoE HAT.
This version comes with 16GB of RAM, but we also carry the 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB, if you like.
Featuring a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, Raspberry Pi 5 delivers a 2–3× increase in CPU performance relative to Raspberry Pi 4. Alongside a substantial uplift in graphics performance from an 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU; dual 4Kp60 display output over HDMI; and state-of-the-art camera support from a rearchitected Raspberry Pi Image Signal Processor, it provides a smooth desktop experience for consumers, and opens the door to new applications for industrial customers.
For the first time, this is a full-size Raspberry Pi computer using silicon built in-house at Raspberry Pi. The RP1 “southbridge” provides the bulk of the I/O capabilities for Raspberry Pi 5 and delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality. Aggregate USB bandwidth is more than doubled, yielding faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other high-speed peripherals; the dedicated two-lane 1Gbps MIPI camera and display interfaces present on earlier models have been replaced by a pair of four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers, tripling total bandwidth, and supporting any combination of up to two cameras or displays; peak SD card performance is doubled, through support for the SDR104 high-speed mode; and for the first time. the platform exposes a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface, providing support for high-bandwidth peripherals.
Please note the Pi 5 is a significant redesign, and Raspberry Pi 4 cases will not fit.
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