[vcf-midatlantic] Museum 3B1 & PDP-8

Ethan Dicks ethan.dicks at gmail.com
Fri Nov 1 14:33:12 EDT 2019


On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 8:45 PM David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic
<vcf-midatlantic at 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


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