Zork on Apple II, wanted for PDP-11 (was Re: Thrift Store find: Apple IIgs) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

21 Jun 2000

--- Jay Jaeger &lt;cube1(a)home.com&gt; wrote:
...
  There is an alternative.  Before Infocom was even
formed, a DEC Field 
 Engineer person (I think fondly known as "The Translator") translated the 
 original MDL (pronounced "muddle") (which predates ZIL) into FORTRAN.  
Bob Supnik.  He and I have worked together on his line of PDP emulator
programs.  I helped find a bug with the rp driver that surfaced when
trying to run 2.9BSD on an emulated PDP-11.  There was a poorly documented
feature that writing to a read-only register would instigate an interrupt
that was a critical feature of the device probing facet of the BSD startup
sequence, but that is another story.

...
  Playing one of these older versions would suit the
vintage of your PDP-11 
 better, IMHO, than running one of the later Infocom ZIL version (even 
 though those might be closer to the original source). 
True, but cooler than _that_ is to run *commercial* game software for
the PDP-11.  I've run the FORTRAN version on various ancient DEC machines.
it's the version that is data-file-compatible with the later products
that I really want to play with.

-ethan
(translator of the MDL sources to Inform - Grab a copy at
http://penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/ )

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