West of House on a Steam Controller?!

Zorkis a text adventure game, which means you play the entire thing by reading text descriptions of the environment and entering text commands. It relies on your ability to imagine the scene — though people, including my own father, cheated by drawing out maps on notepads. Because it is all text processing,Zorkcan run on some surprising hardware.Thanks to Owen Feldman, that hardware now includes the Steam Controller.

No, I am not talking aboutZorkrunning on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine to be playedwitha Steam Controller. Rather,Zorkruns on the Steam Controller’s own internal hardware.

The gamepads that existed whenZorkwas new were really just plastic boxes containing physical buttons, which connected directly to the computer or game console through the ports and wires. If it was particularly fancy, the gamepad might have something like a shift register.

Today’s controllers are very different. They contain their own microcontrollers and SoCs (system-on-chips), which monitor the button inputs, motion, joystick positions, and so on, then communicate commands to the connected computer or console. The new Steam Controller’s main microcontroller is an Arm Cortex-M4, which isorders of magnitudemore powerful than the entire Apple IIc on which my dad and I playedZorkwhen I was a kid.

I think you see where this is going: Feldman determined that the Steam Controller had more than enough spare processing power to run a CP/M operating system, Z-machine (the “engine” underneathZork,The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and many others), andZorkitself.

It may not have been necessary, because those areverylightweight by modern standards, but Feldman programmed a custom Intel 8080 emulator for CP/M in Rust — an extremely efficient programming language. That installs through a firmware updating tool that comes in the Steam package for Linux.

But as impressive as the Steam Controller is, it does not have a screen that can display text and it does not have an alphanumeric keyboard. To makeZorkplayable, Feldman pushed input and output through the USB connector. A small server app on a connected computer displays the text onscreen and sends commands back to the game engine.

This is, of course, very cool. But if you’re considering doing this or something similar, you should know that Feldman bricked his Steam Controller in the process. He was able to eventually fix it by using a Raspberry Pi Pico soldered to the debug pins to flash the original firmware, but there is real risk here. Probably better to just load upZorkon your favorite emulator or purchaseZork Anthologyon Steam!

games
retro
Cameron CowardWriter for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism