Some new text adventure stuff for 2.11BSD

[Adam Thornton]

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

[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

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--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol