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Retro-gaming may be cool, but it’s also an opportunity for some serious hacking. In the true spirit of the word, an enterprising do-it-yourselfer has come up with a hack that combines the mainframe Teletype terminals of the 1960s with early 1980s adventure gaming.

In a post titled, “A New Way To Interact With Fiction,” Jonathan M. Guberman demonstrates the Automatypewriter, a typewriter that can type on its own as well as figure out what you’re typing into it. The latter capability lets the Automatypewriter play a proper text adventure game by reading your input, and then typing out the results.

Strip away the fact that it’s built from a typewriter, and the Automatypewriter doesn’t seem that much different than a regular teletype machine. But unlike with one of those units, the actual keys depress by themselves.

Here’s how it works: the Automatypewriter sends and receives text from a computer in a serial connection via USB, using custom software developed by Jim Munroe. Guberman writes that he attached each key to a solenoid using fishing line. The solenoids sit underneath the typewriter in layers, and are connected to a MOSFET, which allows lower-power parts of the circuit to control the high-power solenoids, he said.

In turn, Guberman connected the MOSFETs in series of eight to shift registers, which are ICs that can expand the number of outputs on a microcontroller. Each time the computer sends a character, the microcontroller chooses which solenoid to fire and sends that information to the shift registers. Going in the other direction, each time you press a key, it makes contact with a flattened resistor; shift registers then expand the number of inputs instead of outputs, Guberman said.

The result: old school adventure game bliss, except somewhat slowly. Check out the project page for details and schematics on how the whole thing is put together. Or watch the embedded video to see the Automatypewriter playing an actual game of Zork.

A new way to interact with fiction from Jonathan M. Guberman on Vimeo.

Don’t miss our feature story on GET LAMP: An Interactive Fiction Documentary for details on the origins of the text adventure genre, beginning with the 1976 introduction of Colossal Cave Adventure.