Why does the Raspberry Pi exist?

There are interpreters available for Linux, DOS and Windows that let you run most of the Infocom format games. ISTR that DOS was the original release platfrom for the Zork games.

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Tciao for Now! 

John.

Well there is SIMH which can emulate an Altair 8080 and some more interesting machines.

I think you can use z80pack to create a generic CPM machine (something with a Z80 but not based on real hardware).

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Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com 
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"  
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

Zork predates DOS.

It was originally on big iron - a PDP10 and consisted of the trilogy as one big game. It was then re-written to run on the home computers of the day. I would have thought that the first versions were likely to have been one (or more) of Apple II, TRS/80 and CP/M (this was still before the release of DOS).

But yes there are a number of z-machine interpreters for Linux (as well as other machines) which let you play Infocom games. There is a thriving community of people who are interested in adventure games

and

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Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com 
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"  
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

sure, sorry, it was a joke/ memory of old times, PIP = Peripheral Input Program

there might be a native forth port - or not from my GG searching

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It's a money /life balance.

Oh - maybe it some other text adventure I had for a CP/M machine - it was a long time ago.

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It's a money /life balance.

forum? there's a NG or 2! rec.games.int-fiction (for game discussion) rec.arts.int-fiction (for internals)

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It's a money /life balance.

GForth Yforth and Pforth exist in my stock linux distro. You can write a forth interpreter in C - no NEED to do it in assembler.

Though it runs faster if the core is in assembler.

as running two stacks is not something most architectures supply as standard.

--
Ineptocracy 

(in-ep-toc?-ra-cy) ? a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Peripheral Interchange Program, actually.

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roger ivie 
rivie@ridgenet.net

The 'adventure' game was ported to a DEC10 environment, and then (or maybe simultaneously) to Unix, but it began life somewhere else. The Linux version says:-

----------------------------------------------------------------------- You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

This is an implementation of the original Colossal Cave Adventure.

Original development by Willie Crowther.

Major features added by Don Woods.

Conversion to BDS C by J. R. Jaeger

Unix standardization by Jerry D. Pohl.

Bug fixes and enhancements by David Fenyes.

If you want to end your adventure early, say "quit". To suspend you adventure such that you can continue later say "suspend" (or "pause" or "save"). To see how well you're doing, say "score". There are certain shortcuts;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Through how many portings did the 'suspend you adventure' typo propagate, I wonder?

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Windmill, TiltNot@NoneHome.com        Use  t m i l l 
J.R.R. Tolkien:-                             @ S c o t s h o m e . c o m 
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

I played it on a Data General Nova in the late 70's. Pretty certain it had no typo.

Sure there's forth available under linux - I meant a standalone or 'native' forth. But it would nice to have some interface words to the GPU!

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It's a money /life balance.

It's been a long time. (join in the chorus)

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It's a money /life balance.

Yes I know, but most of the conversation on if has left the building (or rather usenet).

Sorry for the delay in posting this. Had a blown PSU on the machine with my .newsrc file that needed a replacement.

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Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com 
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"  
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

It has indeed! I reckon it was just about 40 years ago when I was experimenting with CP/M v2.2 after acquiring a couple of part built Transam Tuscan S100 bus computer kits as spares for my own Transam Tuscan at, afaicr, the Norbreck amateur radio rally. I can't remember atually using PIP. The closest I got to that was using the MSDOS copy command, which includes the functionality of a utility like PIP, when loading rom image files into an eprom programmer.

The CPM was part of the package of bits on a set of 8 inch floppies with two mains powered 8 inch floppy drive units in a seperate unit fabricated, like the rest of that part built system out of heavy guage sheet aluminium and square section alloy 'tubing' used as 'angle iron' to screw join everything together (even the keyboard had its own such box!).

That half of the two systems comprised a seperate PSU box leaving the mainboard mounted on its own in a large box: a total of four boxes in all. The other system had been built into the proper Transam Tuscan supplied case which could accept a pair of 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives (I can't recall whether it had a drive fitted, or even a controller expansion card).

I put the 'seperates' together and booted the CP/M to have a play with my very first real OS. Afterwards, I copied it onto 5 1/4 inch floppies and then onto 720K 3 1/2 inch disks which, I think, must still be lurking about (probably in the basement rather than amongst my PC floppy disk collection of some 700+ disks).

I didn't get much time to play with CP/M itself since I'd started building PCs from kit made up of secondhand parts bought at various ham rallies and computer fairs which resulted in my getting acquainted with Microsoft's rip off version of CP/M86, aka MSDOS 3.3.

Another reason for neglecting CP/M on the S100 Bus machine was that I had done all the hard work in getting a couple of Philips solenoid operated data cassette drives[1] to function as a floppy disk substitute and the development of the associated TOS[2] which I wanted to see to completion.

[1] These data cassette deck drives were bought from my local government surplus store at a fraction of the then 150 quid asking price of a 5 1/4 inch floppy (and the similarly priced S100 bus controller card).

The formatted capacity of a C60 sized data cassette (normal cassettes could also be used) was 332KB each side. The drives were half track and had bi-directional capstain drive, but only single half track read and write heads - the bi-directional capstain drive only facilitated an optimsed block seeking algorithm, you still had to manually flip the tape over to use the other 332K's worth of storage. The drive had an extra sensor to detect which side of a data cassette tape was being accessed though.

When I finished testing the elctrical requirements of the motors and solenoids and built the support electronics and the TOS[2], the system could do an end to end block search in 14 seconds and load the 8K TCL basic in 5 seconds flat which was a vast improvement over other floppy disk alternatives such as the Sinclaire wafer drive and some of the other toy computers' inept use of actual floppy disks.

[2] TOS; Tape Operating System. In this case, the crudest and simplest one I could devise for my purposes. It was (rather) loosely based on CP/M (10+3 character filename format rather than CP/M's (and MSDOS's) 8+3 format but the FS turned out to be based on MS's FAT system (effectively FAT8).

Whether this was due to my friends' suggestions on implementing a tape FS was due to influence by their knowledge of MSDOS's FAT system or just a matter of logical common sense (CP/M's FS was needlessly complex and endowed with an excessive amount of redundency - hence my seeking the advice on an alternative), I couldn't really say. The point was, when it came to understanding the basics of MSDOS's FAT system, I had a bit of a head start.

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Regards, J B Good

It seems like it was just yesterday when last I ran PIP under RT-11 on a PDP-11. Oh wait, it was.....

bill

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Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves 
billg999@cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. 
University of Scranton   | 
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include

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I see you're posting from Earth....

Bill doors email me, Nicki agrees catharsis is good...