Re: [TUHS] Gaming on early Unix

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

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Well, OK, there's one other wrinkle.  Building Frotz on 4.3BSD (or
whatever) on a VAX would be easy, because you have a 32-bit address space.
But the Z-machine can address 64Kwords (plus some trickiness for access
strings in high memory) so you'd have to actually implement a segmented
memory model or overlays or something to squeeze it into a PDP-11.  Which
is obviously doable--after all, the Z-machine was designed to be
implemented on 8-bit micros!--but means that porting Frotz might be more
work than just writing a new interpreter, and supporting the later, larger
games (Infocom used the v5 format, which doubled the size and required 128K
even on 8-bit systems, and a lot of the post-Infocom community work--before
the community went to Glulx, which is a
32-bit-inspired-by-the-z-machine-virtual-machine-for-text-adventures--used
z8, which doubled the size again) is going to be harder.

Jimmy Maher has just been talking about the evolution of the Z-machine over
on filfre.net.  It's well worth reading.

Adam

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 6:22 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

> There was not a Z-Machine interpreter for Unix machines, as far as I know,
> until the release of the ITF interpreter in the early 90s.
>
> However....
>
> Zork was developed under ITS (when it was "mainframe Zork" and an MIT
> student project), and the later Infocom games were developed under TOPS-20.
>
> As it happens, I've fairly recently ported the "Frotz" Z-Machine
> interpreter to TOPS-20.  https://github.com/athornton/tops20-frotz and
> https://github.com/athornton/gnusto-frotz-tops20
>
> This was not all _that_ hard.  KCC on TOPS-20 is an ANSI C compiler, so
> there were basically two classes of problems to solve.
>
> The first one is that the linker requires all symbols that are linked
> between modules to be six characters or shorter (and case is folded), so I
> wrote a transmogrifier (gnusto-frotz) to extract those symbols and create a
> mapping for them so that the object code would link.
>
> The second problem was that the Frotz source assumes 8-bit bytes and that
> your word length is a multiple of 8 bits.  Since the Z-machine is a 16-bit
> virtual machine, that meant there was a whole lot of bit masking necessary
> in the opcodes and memory references in order to represent the Z-machine
> memory correctly within the TOPS-20 address space.  That's done with stuff
> like:
>
>
> https://github.com/athornton/tops20-frotz/blob/0130a67fc44e0c7de1faa8f882cbc28faee76756/frotz.h#L488
>
> So the idea is, gnusto-frotz-tops20 is semantically equivalent to regular
> Frotz, but with macros changed so if you build it with -DWEIRD_WORDSIZE it
> would build on a 36-bit system.  Then once you've modified the source, you
> run it through the transmogrifier (which really just generates a sed
> script) to get something that will _link_ on a 36-bit system.
>
> I have vague plans to port Frotz to ITS but the problem there is that the
> C compiler is pre-K&R rather than ANSI, so there's a lot of deprotoization
> work to be done, and _then_ I need to fix the things like += being =+ and
> so forth, and I think I have to chop another character off the symbols,
> which may mean I need smarter collision detection.  So it's nontrivial.
>
> Maybe a good first step would be unprotoizing Frotz and getting it to
> build on v7 or so...
>
> Adam
>
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 3:52 AM Gabriel Diaz <gdiaz@qswarm.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>>
>> Source code has been published of some early games.
>>
>> Were those games playable on Unix machines at the time? What was your
>> favourite game?
>>
>>
>>
>> https://kryptonradio.com/2019/04/18/zork-source-code-presumed-lost-forever-has-been-uploaded-to-github/
>>
>>
>> Gabi
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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