infocom on other systems

[Rick Murphy]

At 02:19 AM 9/2/2008, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 10:34:58PM -0400, Rick Murphy wrote:
> > Good luck with getting the interpreter running on the PDP-8. I'd say
> > that it's pretty much impossible.
>
>I don't know about _impossible_ but it certainly is extremely difficult.
>
> > Getting something as simple as Adventure fit onto the PDP-8 was a lot
> > more work than I'd like to admit. Anything more complex is out of the
> > question.
>
>It's not a case of brute-force vs complexity... Adventure is a
>monolithic FORTRAN (now FORTRAN or C) program, and even with overlays,
>it's a) huge, and b) internally complex.  The advantage of the Z-machine
>is that the _game_ complexity is all in the game file.  The platform just
>has to handle a few dozen opcodes and be able to swap in needed portions
>of the game file on smaller hosts (larger hosts, i.e. - that can directly
>address 128Kbytes or more, can just pull everything in and advance the
>Z-machine program counter at will).

Interesting. Seems that there's workarounds for the memory limitations 
of the '8.
Especially if you're willing to work to pack the data (3 8-bit bytes in 
2 12-bit words.)

Never say never, I guess. :-)
         -Rick