1 Sep
2008
1 Sep
'08
11:45 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Fundamentally, I think one would have to scale up all
the 16-bit Z-pointers
to 24-bits internally to a theoretical PDP-8 Z-machine, and there's a lot
of 16-bit math going on under the hood.
That sounds like the really hard way to write an interpreter for the
PDP-8. It would be much easier if you just pretend it's an 8-bit
machine, and do 8-bit arithmetic, and 16-bit double precision, just as
was done in the 6502 interpreter.
A fairly naive implementation should suffice for most of the early V1-3
games. Once those are running, add swapping of impure data, and you'll
be able to run larger games.
Eric