9 May
2005
9 May
'05
2:57 p.m.
On Mon, 9 May 2005 Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote:
On Mon, 9 May 2005, Christian Corti wrote:
For that matter, I've written ZEMU, which is a Z-machine implementation
for the PDP-11. Runs on RSX and RT-11. Should probably work on RSTS/E as
well, but might need some tweaking.
Plays anything from version 1 to 8, I believe. I've tested it some on Zork
Zero (which is my only V6 game), and it works as far as expected,
considering that it don't appear to work without special hacks that I
haven't done.
V3 to V5 has done major testing and works like a charm however.
ZEMU is written entirely in MACRO-11, and is only understands DEC
terminals. But it does do some pretty good work and tricks with the
terminals. Very nice if I may say so myself. :-)
Oh, and the source is available. The RT-11 work was done by Megan Gentry.
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
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.
Totally cool! Was this just for fun or did Infocom suspect a 5100 series
market and hire you to do it? :)
Anyone interested in playing Zork on an IBM 5110
?
For certain. I just need to find a 5110 first :/