There's currently a discussion on the CCtalk list about running Infocom games on DEC machines; maybe something below will be relevant here:
>>Cool. I know that Infocom did publish ZORK I for RT-11, but I haven't seen it >>myself. > > At one point they had RT-11 versions of most of their games. I bought a > copy of Sorcerer from them (for $35) a trillion years ago, and disassembled > and commented it. I later tried to use it to play Hitchhiker's Guide > (which was never released for RT-11) but I think it was a microscopically > different version of the Z-machine so there were problems. The Z-machine for RT-11 that Infocom released only handled v3 images. HHGTTG definitely had a v5 version, but without looking, I can't remember if the first version was v3 or v4. The difference between v3 and v5 is not microscopic - it's on the order of 4X in terms of object and string capacity. ISTR in v4, they added some real-timey "status line" stuff, for games like "Seastalker", and bumped up some of the memory addressing limits. You can run a v3 game comfortably in 48K bytes, painfully in 32K bytes, even on an 8-bit host. You essentially can't run v5 game on 32K because the "impure store" and the interpreter won't fit (or it _might_ fit but with not enough free pages for the parser to remain resident). Some of the later games essentially required 64K or even 128K of mem. Once machines jumped to 256K or more, the paging system fell away and the interpreters just sucked the entire game file into RAM and moved pointers around. ----- Original Message ----- From: James Zeun To: Model 100 Discussion Sent: Friday, May 08, 2015 10:41 AM Subject: Re: [M100] Text Adventures Wow Andrew thank you for the heads up, that sounds great! I really love my little M100, while I'm waiting on having a ROM burnt, I thought I'd have a play about with some games :-) On 8 May 2015 at 15:27, Andrew Roach <[email protected]> wrote: There is a list member working on a Z-Code interpreter, that would enable playing Zork (and all other infocom games). On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 10:24 AM James Zeun <[email protected]> wrote: Random question fellow M100 users, While I'm sorting out getting my REX to work, I thought I'll look at some games and wondered if they ever released any text adventure games like Zork? James -- My retro tech blog and general ramblings http://bytemyvdu.wordpress.com/
