Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 12:12 AM Adam Thornton via cctech
<cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in Tucson...

I'm a bit far off but it sounds cool.

> So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my
> PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a real
> terminal.

Fun!

> Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP
> https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp
> https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/

Thanks for this.

> My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite
> Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't
> allocate enough memory to start it.

Is this just a 64K segment problem?  Perhaps there needs to be some
examination and optimization of the impure and pure storage and
caching design?

One can play larger games with 128K of total RAM on microcomputers,
but most of those engines are written in assembler not C so the engine
is tightly coupled to the processor architecture.

-ethan