Thursday, September 20, 2012

How to play Zork in Windows 7

I was in the mood for a game and thought of one in particular that I had only stumbled through the first part of in a very lovely NWN2 adaption. There were no visual adaptions for Zork II or Zork III, so I had to go to the original if I wanted to find out what happens after one has found the tewnty treasures!

Unfortunately, Zork, an older text-based adventure game, was apparently incompatible with my 64-bit system--- or so my computer reported to me. This was a bit of a problem. The simplest solution was to install DOSBox, a DOS emulator, and run the games from there.

To play Zork on your Windows 64-bit system:
  1. Download and install DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1).
  2. Download the part of Zork (http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/instructions.html) that you wish to play. If you want to go through the whole chain, you will need to download all three parts and repeat instruction 4 for each part.
  3. Extract your download(s) to some drive on your computer, perhaps the c: drive.
  4. Start DOSBox. If you extracted to the c: drive and downloaded Zork II, for example, type:

       mount c c:/
       c:
       cd zork2
       zork2
The game should begin.

If Zork does not begin, check the following:

*If you did not extract the game to the c: drive, replace "c" in the first two lines with the names of whatever drive you extracted to.
*Check the game folder and its contents.
   **If you have a different game, replace zork2 on the third line with the name of the game's folder and replace zork2 on the fourth line with the name of the .bat file immediately inside.
    **If you ended up with another folder inside of the game folder, you probably extracted the game to a folder in the c: drive. After the second line above, type cd [name of folder] until you get to the folder in which the .bat file is located. When you have typed cd [name of folder with the .bat file], type the name of the .bat file, as in the fourth line above.


Zork I, II, and III can be found here: http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/instructions.html

DOSBox can be found here: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1