A friend of mine just pointed me to Retro, a PC/XT emulator written in Java.
It’s got a few games ready to roll, which is cool. While not a full featured as dosbox, it does feel significantly smaller, compared to jdosbo’s 2mb image. And since it’s browser based, it’s not like it’s all that difficult to check out.
There we have it, after a LOT of fighting the emulators, missing bits, LOTS of help the hercules-os380 mailing list, and the EXCEPTIONAL of one Paul Edwards, and it’s running.
It seems to be Dungeon version 1.2C
read news
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
01-MAR-81 Late Dungeon Edition
This is a version of Zork on VM/370The problems with it are:
-Lack of an endgame.
-Simple parser (no compound sentences).
-Numerous bugs and spelling errors.
But so what.If you encounter problems or find logic, spelling, or usage bugs,
keep them to yourself.>
It’s a little odd playing zork on a mainframe…
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.
Where there is some flap going on in the Hercules mainframe emulation package, which caught my eye… I was wondering what other mainframe emulators are out there for the PC?
Sadly the answer is not a heck of a lot… There is sim390, which is geared to running the MUSIC/SP operating system, however the author died a few years ago, and it seems that there will not be any more releases, nor any source release.
There is also this old program, PC/370. And it provides an environment much like DOSBox, in that it traps and emulates MVS OS calls, and executes mainframe code on your PC!
PC/370 is old though, the last version was released around 1988! However it’ll run on dosbox just fine, and FAST too! I was clocking over 6million operations a second on one of the benchmarks!
While also looking around at PC/370, I came across this site, which includes a full PDF copy of the book “Mainframe Assembler Programming”. Special thanks goes to Bill Qualls for making this great resource available!
A special note, if you try to unzip the pc370.zip file, it’s so old that there is some encoding method not 100% supported by a bunch of modern unzip programs.. You may need to unzip with real pkzip.
A neat feature of PC/370 is that you can use the PC graphic modes… like the simple demo plot XY…
PC/370 plot XY
Anyways, that’s about it!