On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 8:45 PM David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I wonder though if there is something like Zork for this system or if it can be adapted.
My wife did a port. Also was involved in nethack and kept it running on the 3B1 for a while. Current nethack won't fit. http://www.pdp8online.com/shows/vcfe16/3b1-zork.shtml
Nice.
I think you can compile the Z machine for it and run the classic games.
I would expect a Z-machine would be easy to put on there. Even a machine with 32K can run the original "v3" games. The later games did take more RAM but not megabytes. If you want that original flavor, I ported the original MDL sources to Inform about 20 years ago... http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/zdungeon.z5 There's one outstanding major bug I need to get around to fixing - because of differences in order of actions in the MDL loop and the Inform loop, if the thief pickpockets you the exact turn you pick up a treasure, you won't get the points for finding it. The workaround is delay for a couple of turns until he moves on, then either he has stolen it, or you can pick it up and get all the points. It's winnable but it's also _possible_ that a specific playthrough could be blocked from completion. It's unlikely anyone is going to attempt a full game at a museum, so no worries there. I just wanted to mention that in case anyone here tries to play it all the way through. All classic machines should play Zork. It's a big part of 80s gaming. -ethan