Johnny Billquist wrote:
However, have you ever programmed on a PDP-8?
If so, you would realize that it really requires you to do things a bit
different from what people nowadays do.
You have 4K word pages. One word is 12 bits. The addressing style of
instructions really limit most routines to what you can fit into 128
words. No stack...
Well 12 bits holds 2 6 bit chars nicely :)
I suspect the best way to do this is to convert Z-machine
data into something better suited for 12/24 bit processing.
Well, there are a lot of things to play around with.
Like I said, it wouldn't be difficult to write a Z-machine interpreter
for the PDP-8, but you'd better not base it on something written in C.
You might pick an idea or two from Frotz, for instance, but you'd have
to rewrite that as well to fit with the PDP-8.
Well the PDP-8 is easy to program in -- 8 instructions types. :)
And you have almost no OS to support you either, so
you'd have to
implement the I/O as well, and figure out which, if any, clock you have,
if you want to implement timed input.
Oddly you have better OS support now with the emulators and
some new-ish hardware that uses ide drives.
Johnny