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You Are Standing in an Open Field... Inside SAP GUI

Alice_V
Active Participant
‎2025 Dec 09 4:51 PM
761

unnamed (4).jpg

 

How I ported Zork to ABAP in one day and made 46-year reunion of two mainframe legends possible.

1979 was quite a year for the mainframe: In Germany, SAP released R/2, the integrated ERP system that would define enterprise computing. In Massachusetts, Infocom was founded to commercialize Zork, the text adventure born on MIT's PDP-10 mainframes.

For 46 years, they ran on parallel tracks. Until last month.

Microsoft released the original source code for Zork I. The stars aligned. It was time for a family reunion.

I got nostalgic. I wanted to play Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. But I didn't want to play it in a browser or a terminal. I wanted to play it where I spend my time: In SAP GUI.

So, I decided to port the Z-Machine (Infocom's Virtual Machine) into SAP S/4HANA.

The Z-Namespace destiny... you knew it. In SAP development, every custom object must start with the letter Z: (Also Y, but Y is not used widely. And no one knows why Y is not used)

  • The Machine: Z-Machine.
  • The Transaction: ZORK.
  • The Package: $ZORK.

So it felt like it was meant to be here.

Building a VM in One Day (The "How")

"Alice," you say, "Writing a Virtual Machine in ABAP takes weeks of reading bit-level specs."

It took one day.

And I wrote almost none of it:

 
ZORK T-CODE in SAP GUIZORK T-CODE in SAP GUI

99% Vibe coded

I used VSP (Vibing-Steampunk) — my open-source bridge that gives Claude (or Copilot/Codex/Mistral Vibe - any other Assistant) direct access to the SAP system via MCP. I treated the AI not as a chatbot, but as a Senior ABAP Developer who loves retro specs.

Here is what happened when my Z-Machine crashed on the first turn:

Me: "It crashes when I try to LOOK. Plz debug."

Claude didn't guess. Using VSP, Claude:

 

  1. Set a breakpoint in the ABAP code.
  2. Ran the game inside SAP.
  3. Inspected the memory (finding a Big-Endian vs Little-Endian mismatch in the object table).
  4. Fixed the code.

 

This isn't just generating text. This is Digital Archaeology assisted by Artificial Intelligence.

Why This Matters

I now have Zork running in S/4HANA.

But the real story isn't the game. It's the capability.

If an AI agent can read a 1980s technical spec, navigate a custom ABAP stack, and debug runtime errors to reunite two pieces of 1979 history...

...imagine what it can do for your 2005 legacy code ^_^ (Yes, even with ECC).

Credits:

  • Infocom (1979) for the Z-Machine.
  • SAP (1979) for the R/2 legacy that led us here.
  • Graham Nelson for the Z-Machine Standards Document.
  • Claude (2025) for writing the code.

P.S. West of House. There is a transport request here.

#SAP #ABAP #Zork #RetroGaming #AI #MCP #DigitalArchaeology #OpenSource #Microsoft

Shout out to Scott Hanselman: Tnx for driving Open Source initiative ^_^

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