25 Apr
2006
25 Apr
'06
1:52 a.m.
David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
there.
On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Johnny Billquist wrote:
at the
> People have been bouncing ZORK, DUNGEON and
Infocom around a while now.
IIRC, Zork was released in three parts parts because home computers time could not handle a game the size of MDL Zork.
True in a way. The game was split up because it was too large. It was
also reimplemented because MDL didn't exist for home computers, and that
language in it self required too much resources and in general required
too much of the computer.
A big breakthrough was when they decided, and managed to pull off the
Z-machine.
You can all read about this at the http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/
website. Lots of articles and interviews with the original implementors.
And ZEMU
*should* work on RT-11. I have a suspicion that maybe one or
two routines might be missing. If they are, it will takes us close to
zero time to fix it, if just someone with RT-11 steps up to the plate.
I don't have any RT-11 systems, nor much RT-11 knowledge myself. I can
write some code, but I definitely can't test it.
If you can compile straight ANSI C on RT-11, you can use Dumb Frotz The result won't have screen handling, but
it'll run most any Z-machine
program out there. Implementing screen-handling for an RT-11 version of
Frotz shouldn't be very hard.
In your dreams. :-)
First of all, I suspect that dumb Frotz still would get into major
problems with the small address space of a PDP-11. Second, Frotz makes
some assumptions about file handling that just isn't true on all
non-Unix systems. And screen handling is a story of it's own.
But people are welcome to try. Heck, I can even offer an RSX machine if
someone wants to take a shot at it there, with an ANSI C compiler...
It would be interesting to watch, at least. People often just don't
understand how much Unix-specific stuff is going on in the code.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at update.uu.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol