25 Apr
2006
25 Apr
'06
7:08 a.m.
On 4/25/06, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
People have been bouncing ZORK, DUNGEON and Infocom
around a while now.
Let's clear this up once and for all (I hope).
First there was ZORK.... in MDL and ran on PDP-10 systems only.
.
.
.
You're probably out of luck if you ever want to
play the original ZORK on
anything but a PDP-10.
Zork is included on the klh10 "Panda" distribution (along with TOPS-20), if you
want to try out the original and you don't happen to have a 36-bit computer
in the back room.
So, this leaves us with two ZORK, and one DUNGEON. Are
they the same?
No. But they all originated in the MDL ZORK.
ZORK I was a reimplementation by the same persons who wrote MDL ZORK.
New language, new parser, some new stuff, some stuff from MDL ZORK cut
out, and probably some improvements as well.
DUNGEON was a reimplementation from a version of the MDL ZORK, but
written in FORTRAN. This wasn't even from the final version of the MDL
ZORK. However, new stuff in the MDL code somehow usually got implemented
in the FORTRAN version as well a bit later.
And "ZDungeon" is my direct translation of the MDL sources (copyright
1978, 1979,
MIT, FWIW) to Inform. The only time I referenced Bob Supnik's FORTRAN
version or the C code descended from that was to track down *exactly* what
order the Thief traverses the rooms (working with Bob Supnik and Dave Lebling
to verify how the original code did it - it does a simple list
traversal, but the room
list happens to be in the reverse order that they appear in the code).
Infocom only released ZORK I as a commercial product
for the PDP-11.
ZORK II and ZORK III never was. And if I remember correctly, they only
released a version for RT-11 on one 8" floppy.
I saw Planetfall on the peg at the local DEC store c. 1983 (same format...
RT-11, 8" floppy).
-ethan