[TUHS] Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[TUHS] Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Adam Thornton]

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I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in Tucson,
or want to come to Tucson for it, you're invited; email me for the address
and time).

Although the party is Elvis-themed, it's really about boardgaming and
classic videogaming.

So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my
PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a real
terminal.

Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP (which I
have renamed "zterp" for obvious reasons) to 2.11BSD on the PDP-11, and I
also wrote a little utility I call "tmenu" to take a directory (and an
optional command applying to files in the directory) and make a numbered
menu, so that my guests who are not familiar with Actual Bourne Shell can
play games too.

These things are at:

https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp

and

https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/

Both are K&R C, and compile with the 2.11BSD system C compiler.

My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite
Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't
allocate enough memory to start it.  Other than that, V5 and below seem to
work mostly fine; V8 is in theory supported but no game that I've tried has
little enough low memory that I can malloc() it using C on 2.11BSD.

Adam

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Re: [TUHS] [PiDP-11] Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Johnny Billquist]

Interesting. Trinity works fine under ZEMU.

So ZIP must be rather a hog...

V8 games that I've played under ZEMU:
BALLERINA
DREAMHOLDER
HEROINE
VIOLET

   Johnny

On 2020-01-04 06:12, Adam Thornton wrote:
> I'm having a party on Saturday January 11 (and if any of you are in 
> Tucson, or want to come to Tucson for it, you're invited; email me for 
> the address and time).
> 
> Although the party is Elvis-themed, it's really about boardgaming and 
> classic videogaming.
> 
> So I kind of wanted to put a general-purpose Z-machine interpreter on my 
> PiDP-11, so that people could play Infocom (and community) games on a 
> real terminal.
> 
> Turns out there wasn't really one, so I ported the venerable ZIP (which 
> I have renamed "zterp" for obvious reasons) to 2.11BSD on the PDP-11, 
> and I also wrote a little utility I call "tmenu" to take a directory 
> (and an optional command applying to files in the directory) and make a 
> numbered menu, so that my guests who are not familiar with Actual Bourne 
> Shell can play games too.
> 
> These things are at:
> 
> https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-zterp
> 
> and
> 
> https://github.com/athornton/pdp11-tmenu/
> 
> Both are K&R C, and compile with the 2.11BSD system C compiler.
> 
> My biggest disappointment is that the memory map of Trinity, my favorite 
> Infocom game, is weird and even though it's only a V5 game, I can't 
> allocate enough memory to start it.  Other than that, V5 and below seem 
> to work mostly fine; V8 is in theory supported but no game that I've 
> tried has little enough low memory that I can malloc() it using C on 
> 2.11BSD.
> 
> Adam
> 
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-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol