Hello!

Some of you probably know that Zork 1-3 - and perhaps others - have previously been distributed freely (I don't know the finer details about the legal state/availability of those games anymore) by Activision in a .z5 format; the z-machine files could be run on various interpreters and you could move them to whatever device you had - be it old-ass palm handhelds or modern iPhones - and now that I out of... I don't know, respect, bought the anthology off GoG, I was surprised when the games were installed with no .z5 files.

To make a long story short; I'm 17 and have no experience of playing these games when they were new; I have just assumed that these .z5 files were how the games have always been distributed, along with some sort of interpreter compiled for the OS - C64, DOS, whatever - is that not the case? The reason for me asking is, of course, because I want to be able to play Zork on any device I will ever own. Because I'm crazy and care about such things.

I know this post is badly written and a grammatical mess. I hope it's cool! Thanks in advance for anyone that can enlighten me in these confused times.

File extension Z5 description:
The Z5 file extension is associated with Infocom and used for files that contain Z-machine instructions (called story files, or Z-code files). Z-code files usually have names ending in .z1, .z2, .z3, .z4, .z5, .z6, .z7 or .z8 (and occasionally .dat), where the number is the version number of the Z-machine on which the file is intended to be run.

Types 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7 are extremely uncommon; most Z-machine data files are types 3, 5, or 8. Type 6 provides some graphics support.

Interpreters for Z-code files are available on a wide variety of platforms - on various old machines (such as the Apple II, TRS-80 and Sinclair), portable machines (such as Palm OS devices and the Nintendo Game Boy) and most modern platforms.


i dont have the gog version, but i assume it then uses a dat file instead of .z loaded
by an exe file.

For all intents and purposes, this is exactly right. Some very pedantic minutia is possible in describing the differences between versions, but...

And yes, the version available on GOG is basically disk images of the original DOS release, so the relevant files are all .DAT files.

Most interpreters such as Winfrotz/Gargoyle/iFiction etc. will run the .DAT files with no problem, so...No worries about playing where ever you want as long as an interpreter is available.