And what better platform to do so than the Altair?

First get your altairz80.exe, out of simh, or just build it yourself…

Then you’ll need a copy of CP/M! (http://www.schorn.ch/cpm/zip/cpm2.zip)

Finally a copy of Zork (http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/games/zork123_80.zip)

unzip everything into a directory, then run the following

C:\altair>altairz80.exe cpm2

And with any luck you’ll be greeted with the following:

Altair 8800 (Z80) simulator V3.7-1
64K CP/M Version 2.2 (SIMH ALTAIR 8800, BIOS V1.25, 2 HD, 15-Jan-07)
A>

Just like MS-DOS right?. … Not quite. Anyways there is time to tour later, but for now there is dungeons to explore.

The Altair has two floppies (out of eight) and a 8mb hard disk!… So let’s go to the hard disk on I:

I:

changing drives is just like MS-DOS, letter, colon then hit enter. Ok now lets copy in the zork game from the native PC into the emulator. Hat’s off to Peter Schorn for this!

b:read zork1.com
b:read zork1.dat

If all goes well it’ll look like this:

A>I:
I>B:READ ZORK1.COM
READ V-2.21 (03-Dec-06) SIMH Interface V003
Read from “ZORK1.COM” and write to “ZORK1.COM”.
PTR: unit is read only8.5kB written.

I>B:READ ZORK1.DAT
READ V-2.21 (03-Dec-06) SIMH Interface V003
Read from “ZORK1.DAT” and write to “ZORK1.DAT”.
PTR: unit is read only83kB written.

Ok, now with that out of the way, lets enter the Dungeon!

I>zork1
ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rightsreserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Revision 88 / Serial number 840726
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with
a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>open mailbox
Opening the small 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 mortals. No computer should be without one!”

>

Ok, now we are playing one of the greatest games ever. Wikipedia has an awesome article on Zork ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork ) And along with ( http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/zork1/zork1.html ) You can party like its 1982.