RT11 / RSTS-E games

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
> On 2015-05-07 20:41, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>>> I have 2.52 version of Dungeon
>>
>> That's definitely missing some features (puzzles) from later versions.
>> I don't recall what does and doesn't backport from the VMS-era
>> versions.
>
> Revision history:
>
> 16-Jan-03       Backport to RSX-11M-PLUS (V3.2C).
> 20-Oct-94       Bug fixes (V3.2B).
> 01-Oct-94       Bug fixes (V3.2A).
> 01-Feb-94       Portable VMS/UNIX version (V3.1A).
> 01-Jan-90       Portable version (V3.0A).
> 18-Oct-80       Revised DECUS version (V2.6A).
> 18-Jul-80       Transportable data base file (V2.5A).
> 28-Feb-80       Compressed text file (V2.4A).
> 15-Nov-79       Bug fixes (V2.3A).
> 18-Jan-79       Revised DECUS version (V2.2A).
> 10-Oct-78       Puzzle Room (V2.1A).
> 10-Sep-78       Endgame (V2.0A).
> 10-Aug-78       DECUS version (V1.1B).
> 14-Jun-78       Public version with parser (V1.1A).
> 04-Mar-78       Debugging version (V1.0A).
>>
>
> But that "backport" was done by me, and requires an RSX system with split
> I/D-space to run...

Nice version history there.

> I think in general V2.6 was the last version that was generally available
> for PDP-11s.

That seems about right (especially with the 10 year gap, past the
point of most daily PDP-11 use).

>> If you are looking for games you _can_ play, a couple of years ago at
>> VCFe, I hacked one of the RT-11 Z-Machines to run on RSTS/E
>
> I would guess that would be ZEMU?

I think it's actually a decompiled and commented Infocom Z-machine I
got from someone on this list.

I do have it, but on a copy of the daily-driver machine I was using in
2013 or so.  I have to go find it on an archive disk.

> Do you have the RSTS/E fixes around. I
> have been hoping for ages that someone would just try and get it running
> under RSTS/E, since then I could incorporate those fixes into the
> distribution as well.

If ZEMU compiles for RT-11 (not just RSX-11), then the fix, if it
needs one, for RSTS/E would be similar and minor (there's an extra
little twiddle you have to do when allocating memory under the RT-11
emulation environment that is not required on real RT-11).

> Afraid I can't help much, though. All stuff I got is for RSX.

In 1986-1987, I was doing a bunch of RT-11 development for a custom
product.  I was on the PDP-11 all day every day, and my gaming
alternatives were a C-64 (nice, but getting a bit old at that time)
and an Amiga with single floppy and 512MB of RAM (fixed up to 2MB and
20MB disk a year later), so I collected RT-11 games (and OS/8 games,
but that's for another thread).

I know I can find a couple things without firing up entire racks of gear...

-ethan