Zork on Apple II, wanted for PDP-11 (was Re: Thrift Store find: Apple IIgs)

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Jun 21 22:59:48 2000

--- Jay Jaeger <cube1_at_home.com> wrote:
> There is an alternative. Before Infocom was even formed, a DEC Field
> Engineer person (I think fondly known as "The Translator") translated the
> original MDL (pronounced "muddle") (which predates ZIL) into FORTRAN.

Bob Supnik. He and I have worked together on his line of PDP emulator
programs. I helped find a bug with the rp driver that surfaced when
trying to run 2.9BSD on an emulated PDP-11. There was a poorly documented
feature that writing to a read-only register would instigate an interrupt
that was a critical feature of the device probing facet of the BSD startup
sequence, but that is another story.

> Playing one of these older versions would suit the vintage of your PDP-11
> better, IMHO, than running one of the later Infocom ZIL version (even
> though those might be closer to the original source).

True, but cooler than _that_ is to run *commercial* game software for
the PDP-11. I've run the FORTRAN version on various ancient DEC machines.
it's the version that is data-file-compatible with the later products
that I really want to play with.

-ethan
(translator of the MDL sources to Inform - Grab a copy at
http://penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/ )




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Received on Wed Jun 21 2000 - 22:59:48 BST

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