I've been tinkering with ways to squeeze slightly more modern #InteractiveFiction onto a #PDP8 over the past year or two. I was playing with the dictionary from the #Hibernated 1 Director's Cut, which has about 650 entries, and managed to come up with a system that distinguishes all but 55 of those uniquely, and those 55 are lumped into 16 buckets.

Not a bad collision rate, especially given the side-effects of my scheme are less surprising to human players than some other approaches!

The only drawback is that it can't distinguish the diagonal directions well, but with careful command choices and some workarounds in special cases we can avoid this and still have a fairly plush-feeling vocabulary. Now I just need to work on the rest of it to see if it was worth the brainwave!