3 Sep
2006
3 Sep
'06
2:25 p.m.
David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
Frotz???
Why on earth base it on Frotz? Frotz is written in C. You'll never get
anything meaningful written in C to run on a PDP-8.
Something written in Z80 assembly is just about equally meaningless.
No, you'd just have to write it from scratch. Nothing strange about
that, and doing something about V4 and V5 games isn't that difficult
either. Given a little time I sure could whip one together, but for now
I'll leave the exercise to someone else.
I've already written one Z-machine interpreter in MACRO-11. It deals
with anything V1 to V8, except for obvious limitations (no sounds, no
graphics, no mouse...)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Interesting. Looking (very quickly) at the
Z-machine spec, it seems
fairly simple. This gives me a good excuse to start on my PDP-8
emulator again - at least that way if I need more core, I just need to
change a #define instead of starting a big long thread about
semiconductor memory ;-)
I don't mean to discourage you, but you might be in for more challenge
than you bargained for. I asked Brian Moriarty about the feasability of
porting a modern Z-machine emulator to 6502 machines such as the Commodore
64 and Apple IIe. He replied that past V3, the abilities of these
machines were seriously taxed and that's why Infocom abandoned that class
of machines for their later work. The full discussion can be found in the
Frotz documentation. Based on this, I don't recommend using Frotz as a
starting point.
Look instead at ZXZVM, a Z-machine emulator written in Z80 assembly for
PCW machines. It should be reasonably easy to port to CP/M and/or ZSDOS.
I'd love to see that one for my P112. Doing that may provide enough
insight to port it to the PDP8. 
4 Sep
4 Sep
2:40 a.m.
On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Johnny Billquist wrote:
David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>
wrote:
Frotz???
Why on earth base it on Frotz? Frotz is written in C. You'll never get
anything meaningful written in C to run on a PDP-8.
Something written in Z80 assembly is just about equally meaningless.
I mentioned Frotz because it seems to be used as a base for all sorts of
strange ports. The Z80 reference was part generalization and part wishful
thinking.
No, you'd just have to write it from scratch.
Nothing strange about
that, and doing something about V4 and V5 games isn't that difficult
either. Given a little time I sure could whip one together, but for now
I'll leave the exercise to someone else.
I've already written one Z-machine interpreter in MACRO-11. It deals
with anything V1 to V8, except for obvious limitations (no sounds, no
graphics, no mouse...)
Where can I find this MACRO-11 interpreter?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
4:35 a.m.
On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Johnny Billquist wrote:
No, you'd just have to write it from scratch.
Nothing strange about that, and
doing something about V4 and V5 games isn't that difficult either. Given a
little time I sure could whip one together, but for now I'll leave the
exercise to someone else.
I've already written one Z-machine interpreter in MACRO-11. It deals with
anything V1 to V8, except for obvious limitations (no sounds, no graphics, no
mouse...)
There I completely disagree! I've ported the Z-machine interpreter from
InterTaskForce (written in C, and really good if you want to understand
how the interpreter works) to the IBM 5110 (written in PALM assembler),
including paging etc. But until now nobody else has ever wanted to try it
on his 5110/5120... Seems all 5110 owners don't want to use their
machines.
Christian
6531
days inactive
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