[N8VEM: 16184] FW: Zork on the N8VEM

[Andrew Lynch]

HI Dave! Thanks! I have no idea but I know Zork is part of the original
distribution on the N8VEM. I will forward to the N8VEM mailing list and see
if someone knows the answer. Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch

-----Original Message-----
From: dave-***@public.gmane.org [mailto:dave-***@public.gmane.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 3:47 PM
To: Andrew Lynch
Subject: Zork on the N8VEM


In #classiccmp I learned that Zork runs on the N8VEM. Is this a pre-infocom
version or a Z-machine version? If the latter, what interpreter is used?
I'd like to know this so I can more easily come up with a terp that runs on
the P112.

--
David Griffith

[Vince Mulhollon]

Ah this is complicated. The original N8VEM distro had Zork or at least my
memory thinks it did, the latest RomWBW does not. I just downloaded and
checked, unless I was checking in the wrong spot.

The primary font of zork-ness is probably gunkies.org/wiki/Zork

There you can scroll down to CPM and find zork123_80.zip which unzips to a
kit of zorks 1 2 and 3 which work perfectly on my N8VEM ECB SBCv2 board
after being xmodem'd over.

If you examine the files before xmodem-ing them over, you will find that on
modern linux or OSX or a legacy OS if you have FROTZ installed (just a
typical zcode interpreter) you can run cpm's ZORK2.DAT on modern linux
inside FROTZ no problemo. Just tried it a couple seconds ago. So yes,
there exists at least one ZORK1.COM out there which is a zcode interpreter.
And perhaps some pre-infocom versions.

Some people spend some time copying over sorcerer.z3 or whatever filename
and rename it ZORK1.DAT and run ZORK1.COM and the interpreter doesn't
really care so up comes sorcerer or whatever. I suppose if you have 256
logical hard drives living on a compact flash card you could have one
virtual 8 meg drive for each infocom game without over stressing your
storage, although good luck remembering that logical hard drive 179 is
lurking horror and 180 is deadline, or whatever.

Other people patch the ZORK1.COM interpreter to look for LURKING.DAT and
upload lurking_horror.zcode into LURKING.DAT and rename the ZORK1.COM to
LURKING.COM then it works. Frankly 30 years ago this is probably close to
how infocom originally did version 0.00001 of each port. Or maybe shipping
version 1.0 donno. Anyway it works.

Finally supposedly mythically there exists a RUN.COM for CP/M which is a
somewhat generic zcode interpreter that accepts a filename such that you
"RUN.COM ZORK3" and it does about what you'd expect, slap a .DAT extension
on whatever you tell it, and run it. Proto-frotz if you want to call it
that. I have no idea where this can be located in late 2013 or if it still
exists.

There are a zillion mostly downward compatible levels of zcode that are
rarely upward compatible. I would be shocked if ZORK3.COM couldn't be
convinced to run with ZORK1.DAT installed in the place of ZORK3.DAT but I'd
be even more shocked if something complicated like seastalker would run
under ZORK1.COM because seastalker relied on all kinds of advanced (for
zcode) extensions.

BTW I got the USPS mail notification that my P112 is on the way, way cool
man.