[Simh] Dungeon (Zork) questions......

[Rich Alderson]

> Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:01:09 -0400
> From: Mark Abene <phiber at phiber.com>

> My Zork binary is called "DUNGEO.SAV".  It requires two extra files,
> "DINDX.DAT" and "DTEXT.DAT".  The game version identifies as follows:

OK, to be strictly technical, you do not have a "ZORK" binary.

Zork was originally implemented in MDL (a dialect of Lisp created by the
Dynamic Modeling Systems lab at MIT) on a PDP-10 (original KA-10 processor
version) under the ITS operating system.  Since there was also a version of
MDL for TOPS-20, it was possible to run a MDL save file (not to be comfused
with a Tops-10 or TOPS-20 .SAV file) on TOPS-20.

(In point of fact, it still is, both on real hardware such as the XKL Toad-1
which the Living Computer Museum keeps online 24x7 and on the SimH and KLH10
PDP-10 emulators.)

An enterprising DEC engineer reverse engineered the MDL game and programmed
a clone in Fortran.  If I have the history right, this was done first on the
VAX-11 and later on the PDP-11, but I could have those reversed.  That DEC
engineer's name, by the way, is Bob Supnik.

The *commercial* release of Zork for the PDP-11 was done by Infocom, which
was started by the MDL implementors of Zork.  It was done in ZIL ("Zork
Implementation Language"), a MDL subset they created for the express purpose
of putting Zork on small computers (minis and personal/hobbyist computers).

Please, let's keep the record straight as to which programs we are running
under SimH.

                                                                Rich Alderson