2 Sep
2008
2 Sep
'08
4:49 p.m.
At 02:19 AM 9/2/2008, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 10:34:58PM -0400, Rick Murphy
wrote:
Interesting. Seems that there's workarounds for the memory limitations
of the '8.
Especially if you're willing to work to pack the data (3 8-bit bytes in
2 12-bit words.)
Never say never, I guess. :-)
-Rick
Good luck with getting the interpreter running on
the PDP-8. I'd say
that it's pretty much impossible.
I don't know about _impossible_ but it certainly is extremely difficult.
Getting something as simple as Adventure fit onto
the PDP-8 was a lot
more work than I'd like to admit. Anything more complex is out of the
question.
It's not a case of brute-force vs complexity... Adventure is a
monolithic FORTRAN (now FORTRAN or C) program, and even with overlays,
it's a) huge, and b) internally complex. The advantage of the Z-machine
is that the _game_ complexity is all in the game file. The platform just
has to handle a few dozen opcodes and be able to swap in needed portions
of the game file on smaller hosts (larger hosts, i.e. - that can directly
address 128Kbytes or more, can just pull everything in and advance the
Z-machine program counter at will).