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

[Mark Abene]

Pardon my modern vernacular, but I called mine a binary because it is.
The DUNGEO.SAV that I run in RSTS/E is in fact a compiled FORTRAN
version, which makes it a standalone executable and not one of the
original muddle versions.

-Mark

Rich Alderson wrote:
>> 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
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