Infocom on PDP-11

[Johnny Billquist]

On Mon, 9 May 2005 Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 9 May 2005, Christian Corti wrote:
>
> > Porting a Z-Code interpreter to a new machine is a nice exercise. In my
> > case I ported the Infocom interpreter from the InfoTaskforce (written in
> > C) to the IBM 5110 (yes, the 5110, not the 5150) in machine language (yes,
> > you can program that beast in machine language, it has a very nice
> > instruction set IMHO). The binary's size is only 9.5kB and will run any V3
> > games. It includes save/restore, a paging mechanism for fetching needed
> > non-resident code parts from disk (and throwing out LRU ones), line
> > wrapping / 'more'-style pausing for the 64x16 display etc.
> > The interpreter requires at least one 5114 disk drive and 16kB of RWS. If
> > more RWS is available, less page swapping is needed during the game.
>
> Totally cool!  Was this just for fun or did Infocom suspect a 5100 series
> market and hire you to do it? :)
>
> > Anyone interested in playing Zork on an IBM 5110 ?
>
> For certain.  I just need to find a 5110 first :/

For that matter, I've written ZEMU, which is a Z-machine implementation
for the PDP-11. Runs on RSX and RT-11. Should probably work on RSTS/E as
well, but might need some tweaking.

Plays anything from version 1 to 8, I believe. I've tested it some on Zork
Zero (which is my only V6 game), and it works as far as expected,
considering that it don't appear to work without special hacks that I
haven't done.
V3 to V5 has done major testing and works like a charm however.

ZEMU is written entirely in MACRO-11, and is only understands DEC
terminals. But it does do some pretty good work and tricks with the
terminals. Very nice if I may say so myself. :-)

Oh, and the source is available. The RT-11 work was done by Megan Gentry.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
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