Telecommuniations device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork

In today’s episode of ” But will it run Zork ?” a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) — a project he built to expose off on the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was at its most efficient (that might be the late ’70s / early ’80s). Then, he modified a modem in order that the acoustically coupled TDD could possibly be interfaced — transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to maintain, one line at a time at the TDD’s narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren’t exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. Before everything, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to deal with the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took one more tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC . We’d love nothing greater than to work out this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a couple of minutes and skimming Ulysses’ photo blog on the source link.

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This post is tagged: few-minutes, rotary phone, smooth sailing, source link, telecommunications, vintage game