ZMachine!

[Bill E]

A teaser - the PDP-1 ZMachine just loaded Zork and it runs!

Still some work to do, more testing, some polishing, and it's currently a v3 

machine, v5 is the target.

I might release the v3 version though, it will run Zork just fine.

Although, everyone should play Adventure first, it was the original and

has some very clever gameplay.

At least until you find my Easter egg. When you do, don't spoil it!

This was actually much easier than Adventure, there are standards docs that

describe what a ZMachine actually has to do, and there was a lot of learning from the Adventure implementation.

Bill

[sunnyboy010101]

Bill,

I look forward to it, but it's funny... I've got Zork (I, II, and III) on so many machines now (many are variants of CP/M 'real' Z80 boxes) and played it on so many other machines (starting in the 1980's with the first taste of Zork on a Data General minicomputer destined for operational control functions in a field office). 

What has been almost impossible to date is finding a really good, fully-functional version of the original 350 point version of Adventure. (THANKS!!!) Sure, I've played "adventure" under various names on various machines (right from a lame adaptation for the TRS-80 in the 1980's), but too often they fell short. The closest I came was a nice version earlier this year on the Z80, but sadly the save game function was totally broken.

So Zork - YAY, but adventure - MORE YAY!!! :-)

-R

[Phillip Porch, MD]

I'm looking forward to this also. I remember playing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe and think I remember it was a Z game also.

[Bill E]

The ZMachine is the next logical evolution. I like the original Adventure myself, especially now knowing how it works. There was a lot of very clever scripting, random events, etc. Truly amazing.

Of course, none of this is PDP-1 authentic, but you can bet a hacker of the era would have done it if the -1 was still around at the time.

The real reason I'm doing this one is to hopefully attract more people to the -1, it's one of Oscar's visions.

And of course, you can run any of the Infocom games plus some large number of games others wrote.

It does take over the entire drum, though.

Finally, I just find it more fun than running on a -10 or a -11, no annoying OS to deal with.

Bill

[Bill E]

Sorry, I just can't shut up. Planetfall loads and plays. It's the largest v3 game I have, and it was a later game, much better stress test.

Bill

[Adam Thornton]

That's magnificent!  Hitchhiker's Guide ought to work if you can find the earlier releases (that is, not the Solid Gold versions).  If you can't...well, I'm on vacation right now in BC, far away from my archives, but if you haven't found it by next week, I very likely can locate it.

I think the very largest z3 game was Leather Goddesses Of Phobos (again, not the later Solid Gold version).  It used all but 14 bytes of the z-machine address space, or something crazy like that.  It does not, however, have the diagnostic commands to skip the sewer maze, which is the least fun section of any Infocom adventure ever.

Adam

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[Bill E]

It's coming, and soon. Beyond Zork just loaded and ran. With the Type 3 pseudo-graphics font, split-screen, everything.

It completely fills the drum and all of core.

The test suite plays 20 or so v3, v4, and v5 games, so hopefully it will be solid. Oh, and you save and restore your games to the microtape drive! Mount a tape. Yes, you mount tapes, mtp 2 myzorksave.tp for example mounts your tape on drive 2, the ZMachine can read/write it. And it will take just as long as it would have taken with a real Type 500 drive.

Bill

[Adam Thornton]

Holy wow, BZ is a heck of a stress test.  This is amazing.

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[Bill E]

Latest teaser. Recognize this one?

Getting font 3 working has been a pain.

Bill

[Adam Thornton]

I love the fact that you can name the shillelagh (and I think other objects).  It doesn't DO anything if you do so--there's no in-game need to ever name anything, IIRC--it's just the Implementors showing off, I think.

Adam

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[Bill E]

The ZMachine is done! It's in the repo, FunStuff/ZMachine. It includes the original Zork I, II, and III games, and will run up to and including v5 games. You really have to read the instructions. I even added a TL;DR section for the short-attention-span people.

Bill

https://github.com/wjenh/pidp1-mods.git

[Adam Thornton]

Fantastic!  I'll update my copy of the repo today.

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[Bill E]

The wonderful Eve, whoever she is, from the simh side has gotten ZMachine working on the simh emulator, just as she did for Adventure.

I'll add her adapter here soon, not that we care, but it shows again that interoperability between the two emulators is straightforward.

It just requires a little bit of shimming to handle some IOT differences.

Bill

[Adam Thornton]

Wonder if that's the same person as Evie who is HackerSmacker and who runs EVIEVM.

Adam

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