Portability between different computers is only a secondary reason for the Z-machine. The most important reason is code size, making the largest possible game that can fit on a floppy disk.
Although its core is low level, PostScript is a pretty good language by some metrics; it's often been claimed to be a (supposedly accidental) dialect of Forth with some powerful features bolted on.
What makes Zmachine.ps so bad? Certain programming issues, or are you going off a general feel?
This is awesome. Presumably if this worked in Elm, Clojure would work too. There’s a very cool niche community around these games for those who don’t know. Vespers was one of the best games I ever played. Check out ifdb for games. There are mobile players available too.
See the article “How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine” by Marc S. Blank and S. W. Galley, in the July 1980 issue of Creative Computing. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1980-07/page/n...
On Games, get Tristam Island and Calypso in the Z3 versions.
What makes Zmachine.ps so bad? Certain programming issues, or are you going off a general feel?
Vespers on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6dj2vguyiagrhvc2
Due to the UK Online Safety Act, all games on the IF Archive are currently unavailable to users in the United Kingdom.
Uncool. Sigh
gopher://gopher.661.org/1/if-archive
Proxy:
http://portal.mozz.us
The previous URL over the proxy:
https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.661.org/1/if-archive
ZMachine games:
https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/mercury.661.org/1/if-archive/g...
Tristam Island and Calypso (and All Things Devour, plus Spiritwrak) can be fetched over git/github, they are libre games, so no issues there.
I can post links to the compiled ZMachine binaries if you want.