I don’t know how I missed this, but there is a MDL interpreter that can run MDL Zork!
This Zork created December 2, 2015.
West of House
This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
A rubber mat saying ‘Welcome to Zork!’ lies by the door.
“DONE”
> open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet.
> take leaflet
Taken.
> read leaflet
WELCOME TO ZORK
ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you
will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortal
man. Hardened adventurers have run screaming from the terrors
contained within!
In ZORK the intrepid explorer delves into the forgotten secrets
of a lost labyrinth deep in the bowels of the earth, searching for
vast treasures long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by
fearsome monsters and diabolical traps!
No PDP-10 should be without one!
ZORK was created at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, by
Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. It was
inspired by the ADVENTURE game of Crowther and Woods, and the long
tradition of fantasy and science fiction adventure. ZORK is written
in MDL (alias MUDDLE).
On-line information may be available using the HELP and INFO
commands (most systems).
Direct inquiries, comments, etc. by Net mail to ZORK@MIT-DMS.
(c) Copyright 1978,1979 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
All rights reserved.
>
How is that for cool?  The MDL interpreter is called Confusion by Matthew T. Russotto, and can be found here.  There is even a port to Windows, by David Kinder back in 2009!
I don’t know how I missed it, but this is as close as you can get to the original 1979 experience.
Speaking of which, gunkies should be on faster hardware, and the DNS records should be updated by the time you read this.
Regarding gunkies, is there anyone to contact if I want an account there? I tried contacting toersbe multiple times in the past and he never replied…
sure, he replies from time to time, I’ll send him an email on your behalf.
Actually I don’t have your email!
…hm, strange, I definitely had to enter my email for the post, you should be able to see it there somewhere I think?
But I just noticed that he’s supposedly on IRC, according to his wiki user page, so I might try to catch him there…
Dammit, that should have been posted as a reply to the post above :-/
assuming the email you used to post this is real, you should have an account!
I emailed you as well but no reply….
Tore registered a new user a short while ago, so he’s around at least.
Thanks for the heads up about gunkies, I could try to add some content again. It was very hard to do when loading a page took one full minute.. sometimes two! It’s snappy now, in comparision.
Yes it is a billion times better!~
And now there’s the original MDL interpreter for ITS:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mudsys
It’s been found? Does it run??
It’s found, and it seems to work quite well.
However, Zork is too big to be loaded into the interpreter. To do that we need a compiler, and we don’t have that (yet).
Sounds like what is needed is along the lines of how the IBM emulation crowd created the fictional ‘380’, which is a 370 with an expanded memory address space.
Not really. It will fit on an unexpanded PDP-10 when the code has been compiled.
As for extending the PDP-10 address space, that was done by DEC.
C++-17 port of the final 616-point Zork
https://bitbucket.org/jclaar3/zork/src/master/
The only thing more fun than going all the way back, is dragging stuff all the way forward. Although I kind of like being able to preserve the old stuff as much as possible in an ‘as is’ type scenario, but I can see the beauty of this kind of stuff, just in the same way f2c made the original FORTRAN Dungeon accessible to far many more machines lacking FORTRAN.