27 Jan
2009
27 Jan
'09
8:02 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
OK. That makes sense and answers one question I had.
Hi, all,
I was cleaning up around the house and wanted to stash a Model 3 on
the shelf out of the way....
I have diskettes, c. 1982, from a friend lying around, so I booted it
into TRSDOS 1.3.... What it does not do is run Zork or Enchanter.
I have original Zork I and Enchanter disks. Booting up a backup of
the Zork disk gets me to a TRSDOS prompt. I can take a DIR and see
the program and the data file there...
As far as I rememebr, a Model 3 will not boot any Model 1 disk (or of
course vice versa). So the fact that the disks boot to a TRS-DOS prompt
implies they're M3 disks.
I wouldn't be surprised that all but one diskette I have is for the M3.
I have Zork 1 for my Model 1. It was a self-booting
disk, no TRS-DOS or
similar. And it was copy-protected (nothing that SuperUtility couldn't
manage :-)). So again, it sounds like you have a Model 3 version,
I have a hand-lettered "Zork Backup" disk that boots to TRS-DOS. I also
have a commercial original that does not boot. That one is probably for
the M1.
Since the system will boot other disks and run other
programs, I susepct
either an unreadable sector on these games disks or something marginal in
the disk drive or disk controller.
I would guess a bad sector on the game disks, since I have loaded over a dozen
programs from other disks successfully. Since someone did ask, I did try to
boot drive 0 and run Zork from drive 1. The only change was that the lights
had a slightly different cadence to them (since there are two drives), but it
looped endlessly and wordlessly all the same.
Have you tried to make a ackup of Zork and/or
Enchanter? If so, do the
backups behave inthe same way?
I have not yet tried to make backups. I have all the docs so backups should
be not difficult to do once I dig out a box of SSSD blanks from the back of the
closet.
One thing I'm not sure of with the Enchanter original is that since
it's marked "side 1"
and "side 2", but I don't have the box or the box insert, I can't tell
what platform it's for.
It _is_ marked "TRS-80", but I don't recall seeing a model number
mentioned on the
label. The Zork game file is somewhere between about 70K-85K. Enchanter is
almost certainly over 80K (I'd have to find a copy to check), so I guess I'm not
surprised to see that it overflows one side of a TRS-80 SSSD disk, but I am
unfamiliar with where they might have split things. Does anyone else on the
list have TRS-80 versions of early Infocom titles? The rest of my originals are
Amiga, PC, Mac, Atari ST, Atari 800, and C-64, so I have no experience
with TRS-80
versions.
-ethan