Zork on UEFI

Leave it to Matthew Garrett to find some extra time on his hands, and then decide to use it to port Zork (or rather, the Frotz Z-machine interpreter) to UEFI. He wrote about his experiences on his inimitable blog and, during the process, highlighted some of the on-going issues with writing applications for UEFI.

Matthew highlights the fact that the standard C library included in EDK2 only supports UEFI Shell applications, not UEFI applications running directly on UEFI or UEFI drivers. This makes porting code more difficult than necessary, since I've struggled to share code between UEFI drivers and applications, even going to the extreme of writing my "driver" as a UEFI application.

Of course, he just updated Frotz to be a UEFI shell application, and then launched it. This turns out to be trickier than it sounds, since the UEFI shell doesn't set the current working directory where he expected it.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I am a great fan of stretching UEFI into new areas, like text adventures and utility C libraries. More on that in the next few weeks.