Dumb Terminal games (was Re: Looking for a small fast VAX development machine)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Rich Alderson
<RichA at livingcomputermuseum.org> wrote:
> From: Ethan Dicks
> Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 8:23 AM
>
>> Zork (and anything else on a Zmachine)
>
> Ethan,
>
> You should know better.

Of course I do.

>  Zork originated on a PDP-10 running ITS.

Of course it did.

> I first
> encountered it on a TOPS-20 system, since the folks at the Dynamic Modeling
> Lab ported their variant of Lisp to TENEX and TOPS-20.

I didn't get to play it on 36-bit hardware until you gave me an
account.  I've also run it on the klh10/Panda distro.

> It's publicly available to play on the Toad-2 at LCM, and I removed the
> office hours check from the startup program years and years and year ago.

I can easily set people up in front of a real tube on a Linux box and
telnet through to the Toad-2.

> P.S. There is also a copy of EMPIRE, though I think there's a problem under
> the modern monitor.  Probably would work fine on a KS running 4.1.

I'm sure I have EMPIRE for VMS on pretty much any VAX I have ever set
up.  I was just reading up that there's a modern re-implementation in
C but it looks extended from the game I remember (satellites, in
particular, I don't recall from 1986).

-ethan