On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 21:38 Ethan Dicks via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
If anyone wants to pool ideas on covering different aspects of Text Adventures (not perhaps as involved as UNIX Town, but at least
On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 10:45 AM Alexander Jacocks <jjacocks@gmail.com> wrote:
I’d be happy to participate with text adventures on SunOS, on my Sun 3/60 or my Sparc 2. Both would have been common computer lab gaming platforms.
The InfoTaskForce Z-machine goes back to the late 80s and would definitely have been run on workstations in the Sun 3/60 era. https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/old/itf/ There's Frotz, of course, but in the late 80s, there was only the ITF interpreter. I got it working on VMS. It was a trip playing Infocom games on a $120,000 VAX. I also have a working ZAP assembler for SunOS 3 that runs on the 3/60, original from 35 years ago. The code is so crufty that it doesn't compile on modern compilers and even with some basic standard tweaks to modernize it, it does not produce sane output. It will take quite a bit of work to bring it up to date, so for me, it was easier to set up a real Sun 3/60 to test the veracity of the original binary. It's able to take authentic ZAP source and produce functional game files.
We should definitely have at least one system running PDP-10 Zork.
36-bit hardware is one of my gaps, but I've run original MDL Zork via emulation, plus there's also the modern MDL runtime Confusion. With some minor patches to the original code, it works fine. There's also ZDungeon, my module-for-module port of MDL Zork to Inform 6 that I did close to 20 years ago. That runs on anything with a V5 Z-machine. https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/zdungeon.z5 Looks like it's been 16 years since the last release. Good excuse to dust off the source and fix (at least) one last bug I know about. -ethan