The other day I’d been alerted to this fantastic port of the BASIC game to Fortran 77 by Kidon, bringing it to mainframe and midrange machines of the 1970s!

You can read more information at it’s home page here, along with getting the source code and building it out.

Naturally I had to build it using f2c, and QuickC for Windows. Just some minor tweeks and it runs!

Although victory could have gone a bit better. I know it’s largely my fault trying to introduce a clean way to pause before exiting. Obviously there is tonnes of Fortran compilers out there, for many old platforms, so perhaps this will make the Oregon Trail the ‘DooM’ of machines with F77?! Give it a try, there is extensive build instructions, and a quick list of known good platforms, be sure to update with newer (older) stuff that is found to fun!