2 Sep
2006
2 Sep
'06
2:38 p.m.
On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
Interesting. Looking (very quickly) at the Z-machine
spec, it seems
fairly simple. This gives me a good excuse to start on my PDP-8
emulator again - at least that way if I need more core, I just need to
change a #define instead of starting a big long thread about
semiconductor memory ;-)
I don't mean to discourage you, but you might be in for more challenge
than you bargained for. I asked Brian Moriarty about the feasability of
porting a modern Z-machine emulator to 6502 machines such as the Commodore
64 and Apple IIe. He replied that past V3, the abilities of these
machines were seriously taxed and that's why Infocom abandoned that class
of machines for their later work. The full discussion can be found in the
Frotz documentation. Based on this, I don't recommend using Frotz as a
starting point.
Look instead at ZXZVM, a Z-machine emulator written in Z80 assembly for
PCW machines. It should be reasonably easy to port to CP/M and/or ZSDOS.
I'd love to see that one for my P112. Doing that may provide enough
insight to port it to the PDP8.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
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