[Simh] PDP-11 Dungeon

[Jason Stevens]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Bob Supnik <bob at supnik.org> wrote:

> To answer Rich's question: Dungeon was ported to the PDP-11 first, and
> to a PDP-11 without memory management in particular, because that's all
> I had access to at the time.  The demonstration that Dungeon would fit
> in such a small memory footprint led the MIT authors to target the "new"
> hobbyist personal computers of the time and to found Infocom.
>
>
I guess that'd explain why the BSD people were including pdp11 binaries into
their distribution...


> To answer the other questions: I have no source code or documentation
> for the PDP-11 versions.  The revision history shows that the PDP-11
> version was revised several times from 1978 to 1980:
>

That is too bad...

I *THINK* the oldest surviving FORTRAN source then is the "10-OCT-78 Puzzle
Room (V2.1A)" version...  ( which I found here:
http://www.pdp11.co.uk/2009/05/17/rt-11-rx50-disk-images/ ).  I've since
extracted the source using putr (which doesn't like DOSBox... Thankfully
Virtual PC will run it) and I've shoved most of it into Watcom F77... It's
interesting to note that I've gotten the bulk of it to compile by changing
some minor cosmetic stuff..  Naturally I have to ask myself even if it
compiles, will it link/run... :)

Anyways I really don't know if there is a "payoff" besides getting an older
version running from source, that at least if Watcom can compile it, f2c &
g77 have a stab at it as well...


>
> 3,01-Oct-94    Bug fixes (V3.2A).
> 3,01-Feb-94    Portable VMS/UNIX version (V3.1A).
> 3,01-Jan-90    Portable version (V3.0A).
> 3,18-Oct-80    Revised DECUS version (V2.6A).
> 3,18-Jul-80    Transportable data base file (V2.5A).
> 3,28-Feb-80    Compressed text file (V2.4A).
> 3,15-Nov-79    Bug fixes (V2.3A).
> 3,18-Jan-79    Revised DECUS version (V2.2A).
> 3,10-Oct-78    Puzzle Room (V2.1A).
> 3,10-Sep-78    Endgame (V2.0A).
> 3,10-Aug-78    DECUS version (V1.1B).
> 3,14-Jun-78    Public version with parser (V1.1A).
> 3,04-Mar-78    Debugging version (V1.0A).
>
> Then I dropped it until 1990, when I moved it to the VAX.
>
> The "portable" VAX version incorporates so many VAX Fortran idioms that
> it will not compile under any standard Fortran compiler today.
>

I've gotten the 2.6a version (the tarballs say it's 2.5.6) to compile with
Watcom's free F77 compiler, and my ancient copy of Microsoft's PowerStation
1.0 FORTRAN...  There is some trivial tweek in how they evaulated some bit
flipping logic.. I just broke the statement into multiple steps, and it
seems to run ok.

 As a side note, I'm always amazed how much PC fortran compilers sell for,
clearly there must be a market for them....  Or is there that many people
nostalgic for Fortran??


>
> /Bob
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