9 May
2005
9 May
'05
1:55 a.m.
On Sun, 8 May 2005, Ethan Dicks wrote:
One of the events in the timeline mentions a ZIP (Zork
Implementaton
Program - the game engine) for the DECmate. If anyone has ever seen
an Infocom title for the DECmate, I'd love to play with it. I'd
expect that it was for an optional 8-bit coprocessor board, not for
the primary 12-bit 6100 processor, but I'd like to know for sure.
Porting a Z-Code interpreter to a new machine is a nice exercise. In my
case I ported the Infocom interpreter from the InfoTaskforce (written in
C) to the IBM 5110 (yes, the 5110, not the 5150) in machine language (yes,
you can program that beast in machine language, it has a very nice
instruction set IMHO). The binary's size is only 9.5kB and will run any V3
games. It includes save/restore, a paging mechanism for fetching needed
non-resident code parts from disk (and throwing out LRU ones), line
wrapping / 'more'-style pausing for the 64x16 display etc.
The interpreter requires at least one 5114 disk drive and 16kB of RWS. If
more RWS is available, less page swapping is needed during the game.
Anyone interested in playing Zork on an IBM 5110 ?
Christian