5 Apr
2007
5 Apr
'07
5:09 a.m.
On 4/4/07, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
The Z-machine requires a terminal (sometimes called a "scope" in DEC
OSes, as in 'set tt scope') for the status line (number of turns
elapsed, score or time, name of present location...), but I do not
believe v3 games will choke if the status line directives are no-ops.
One could just belt out a stream of text interspersed with prompts,
much like the "SCRIPT" works when printing an ongoing session directly
to a printer.
In any case, plenty of PDP-8s had some sort of terminal instead of
just an ASR-33 TTY. My -8/L has 12K of core, and a PC04 high-speed
paper tape reader. I can load in the RIM and BIN loaders from it. I
don't have to have a TTY. In fact, to save paper, I do most of my
work on it from a VT220, plugging 20mA connection from the W076 right
into the back of the terminal, one of the best features, to me, of the
VT220. If only its VT52 emulation worked with TECO and the VTEDIT
MACRO.
When you say "game data", do you mean
the impure area? If so, I'd
agree for v5 games, but it's substantially less for v3 games - i.e.,
the ones that shipped for the Apple II and the TRS-80 and the C-64,
etc. The larger of the home 8-bitters could run some v5 games, but I
think 32K was the cutoff - machines that had 32K or less were never
asked to run v5 games.
-ethan
Also a Z-machine requires a termial rather than a TTY. From the VT8E to the VT50/VT52 to the VT100 and VT220,
it wasn't that
odd to see other consoles on a PDP-8 than a real ASR-33. The
trick
was how to go from the toggle-in RIM loader up to the application
level. My -8/e has a rope-core ROM board to boot OS/8 from TU56s. It
doesn't _have_ to have paper tape either. It has mass storage and a
boot strap. By the time the -8/a came out (1976), TTYs weren't an
essential requirement if one had floppies or some bootable hard disk.
Yes, there were still plenty of ASR-33s on PDP-8s, but that's not the
only way they came.
-ethan