Zork on the Mainframe?

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Ok, I know this title 99% of the time is a ‘oh whatever’ as most people seem to have confused mini’s with mainframes… PDP-10’s, PDP-11’s, VAX’s (even the massive 11/780), were all minicomputers…

But I came across this post, which just mentions in passing that there was a port of dungeon (zork) to the IBM Mainframe…

And rescued via the internet archive, is Melinda Varian’s home page, which includes…. Dungeon in VMARC format…

The sad thing is that I can barely remember logging on to TSO, using ISPF, and getting out… I was so bad with the system that I’d use an empty file as a template, as copying files was easy, but creating a file on the host took me a whole day.

I vaguely recall using this IND$ thing to transfer files, but I don’t know what you need exactly to facilitate it…

So I’ve downloaded hercules/380 along with the VM370 SixPack and… remembered that I don’t… remember much, let alone enough to actually operate VM/370.

I tried passing VMARC files through PC ARC, and got.. nothing, I even manually byteswapped the files to get nothing.

Oh well I’m at an impass, but maybe some mainframe dude will see this one day, and take a peek.

Oh it’s the end of 2010, welcome to 2011.

—-edit
I got it to run on VM/370 CMS.

4 thoughts on “Zork on the Mainframe?”

        • I’ve seen so many people try to pass mini’s off as mainframes, but multiple racks rather not having multiple standalone processors for things like distributed IO, like the IBM mainframes, but more in line with things like the 11/780 as a mini.

          The mainframes Ive dealt with aren’t in multiple racks, but rather multiple floors for the main compute & storage, with distributed IO world wide, using stuff like Front End Processors.

          I’m pretty sure the IO setup of anything from DEC was nothing like the IBM mainframe stuff.

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