Category Archives: Infocom

Tracking down the InfoTaskForce from 1987.

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So like all zork obsessed people (I really should get help or something), I was trying to build a z-machine interpreter for the x68000, using Lydux’s cross GCC compiler.  And it was honestly looking like a LOT of work in the IO department.  Thinking that the older versions were more simpler, I went looking for the oldest open Z-machine, called the “The InfoTaskForce Infocom interpreter”, released by the InfoTaskForce.  Unfortunately I can only find version 4.01 searching for the source code.  Which still looks too complicated.  But looking the history file, the project started back in 1987.  So with that to go on a new google search got me this:

Infocom Adventure Executor Source Files (1987)(InfoTaskForce)[C].zip

From an TRS-80 dump of all things.  I don’t know what version this is other than the brief copyright mention:

/* (C)opyright 1987 InfoTaskforce. */

All of the files are dated 4/12/2001 so they obviously aren’t original. And the version string is:

echo ( “Interpreter: C Version 1.0\n” ) ;

So assuming this is correct, from the 4.01 history file:

REV_E – June 25, 1987.
———————-

REV_E is the first major overhaul to the interpreter.

* The source is now significantly lint free.

* TERMCAP support has now been added [#define TERMCAP option].

* Screen paging and word wrap has been added, along with a new
command line option which disables screen paging (-p).

* Random number generator seeding using time () added [#define
TIMESEED option].

* Attributes in the object list are listed as bits.

* A debuging version can now be produced as an inbuilt options
[#define DEBUG option].

* The coded requirement that 25k is always free in the system can
now be removed [#define ALLOCALL option].

* A new command line option was added to print the object/room list
as a tree (-r).

* interp.c has been re-written to improve efficiency [large
switches have been replaced with arrays of pointers to funcions].

There are now 14 machines on the porting list:

Machine C Compiler Operational Porting details

128K Apple
Macintosh Aztec C Version 1.06F 18/05/87

128K Apple
Macintosh Lightspeed C 2.01 29/05/87 Use “rb” & “wb” in all fopen()s

IBM PC/AT Microsoft C 4 30/05/87 Link with binmode.obj

DEC VAX 11/780 UNIX V7 cc 01/06/87

HP-9000 HP-UX cc 02/06/87

gould cc 03/06/87

Amiga Aztec C 04/06/87

Pyramid 9810 cc 04/06/87

Pyramid 90x cc 04/06/87

Osiris cc 05/06/87

DEC PDP-11/? UNIX V? cc 07/06/87 EXTENSIVE
mods to fix problems with signed chars.

VAX VMS cc 16/06/87 Add #define
times ttmes to fix multiply defined symbol problem. [infocom.h]

Version 1.00 – August 17, 1987.
——————————-

The REV_C interpreter of June 2, 1987 was officially archived as
Version 1.00 on August 17, 1987.

So this means it’s very 16bit & 32bit friendly, especially on BIG endian machines like the 68000 processor.

Luckily this older version is pretty trivial to compile, and get running.  But I was over thinking the build process and decided to strip the executable as GCC would kick out a 500kb file, which objcopy would extract a 81kb executable.  Stripping it brought the size down to a 50kb executable but it wouldn’t run in either xm6 or run68.  I ended up going in circles for a while trying to find fault in what is broken where until I manually compiled the interpreter, and omitted the strip step and suddenly had a working interpreter.

Now there is one issue, saving doesn’t work.  Something in the libc is having issues using fopen with a file to write.  Reading works perfectly fine though.  So to fix it, I went ahead and redid the save feature to use the HumanOS native _open/_write/_close functions and I’m able to now save & restore a game.

D:\proj\run68\test>run68.exe infocom.X minizork.z3
MINI-ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1988 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 34 / Serial number 871124

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front
door. You could circle the house to the north or south.
There is a small mailbox here.

West of House Score: 0/0
>restore
Filename: mz1.sav
Ok.

Living Room Score: 10/19
>inventory
You have:
A nasty knife
A rope
A sword
A brass lantern (providing light)
A brown sack
A glass bottle
The glass bottle contains:
A quantity of water
A leaflet

Living Room Score: 10/20
>

In this process I’ve also managed to build run68, and verified that it’s operating correctly, as both run68 and XM6 both failed to write to a file with fopen, and both work using the native calls.

Planetfall on a x68000

Planetfall on a x68000

I’m sure most people won’t care but I think it’s great having the ability to run a GCC generated C program in a relatively small interpreter.

If anyone cares, here is my updated cross compiler + run68 source along with tweaked Info Task Force 1.0 source.  Or a disk image that XM6 can boot up, and run some demo programs from Infocom of ages ago.

Virtual IIGS for Chrome, Active GS!

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It’s a simple pluggin for Chrome, download it and you are good to go.  As a bonus, check out The Lost Treasures of Infocom!

No really!

Besides the disk swapping, it’s pretty cool!

Planetfall!

Planetfall!

 

Infocom Games

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feelies!

Did you ever love Zork?  Personally I was into Planetfall.  And what made Infocom cool was the ‘feelies’.  I guess it’s pretty obvious that if you found me here, then you know all about the rise and fall of Infocom, and how it was how they wanted to diversify into business applications… And their portable strategy backfired big time.

But back to the games.  While talking to someone and the topic of Infocom came up, I had to see how many I had as I’d managed to buy one of the ‘collection’ sets of Infocom games.  Sure I felt like “I had them all” but after finding accardi-by-the-sea I found out that not only was I missing some, but they actually had every version of these games that had been released!

Talk about an exceptional collection!

And if you love all the packaging, check out here & here.

 

The oldest CP/M ‘simulator’ out there.

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I was surprised to come across this little simulator simply called ‘com‘ tonight. This program started out as a 8080 instruction simulator for a mc68000 machine running CP/M, back in 1984, and was written by one Jim Cathey.

‘Com’ was then later written up, and published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

From there it’s evolved it’s assembly core to some other 68000 cpu families and platforms, then the MIPS and PowerPC. Then in 2006 the CPU core was re-written in C.

For a while it’s primary platform was a 68000 based Unix, and it still has a lot of unix’isims buried in the source. I’m sure it’d build in MinGW though.

But in the meantime I figured it was yet another reason to fire up the old gcc 1.37.1 for Xenix to give this thing a go.

The biggest, and dumbest thing I fought was without realizing there was both a ‘Makefile’, and a ‘makefile’, and gmake kept running the lowercase one, while I was editing the Makefile in vain… But with that out of the way, and a few includes to fix, it was VERY straight forward to build. Not to mention running Xenix on Virtual PC 2007 on my new intel core i7 cpu, it compiles the C version just about as quickly as I can hit the enter key.

Because it’s on Virtual PC the last few lines of the console are garbled.. Oh well, at least the floppy controller works (as long as you hard code /dev/fd0 to 2,60).

So, here is a picture:

Xenix 2.3.4 with ccom zork1

Xenix 2.3.4 with ccom zork1

And a disk image. All I’ve really done is tweaked a few things, and built this with gcc so it includes a binary for Xenix systems. Also the ‘com.tar.gz’ package did include quite a few sample programs… mandog.com is fun, along with zork 1,2 &3!

On a final note, I thought the Xenix thing was a good road to head down because in the 1990’s there was this BIG push for ibcs2 compatibility across all these Unix platforms on the i386 cpu. Well it’s been largely abandoned work, and the best I got was OpenBSD complaining that its always out of memory, and NetBSD kernel panics!.. Open Solaris has *NO* ibcs2 compatibility even left.

I suspect it doesn’t matter, esp now that you can run some real ibcs2 OS’s in a VM, who needs 3rd party emulation?

I guess I’m just too late to the party.

Frotz on Xenix

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Well after having some fun with gcc, I wanted to try something a little more… “fun”. I’ve had good luck in the past with ‘dumb frotz‘ on the old BSD stuff (4.2/4.3 etc) but surprisingly I had no luck at all with gcc & xenix.

Well that was rather odd.

So in some crazed attempt I tried the regular version of Unix Frotz 2.32. Xenix was lacking the memmove procedure, but thanks to an old post here, I was able to get it running under Xenix.

Ok, fair warning it is SLOW. It’ runs the cpu into 1.0 levels… I don’t know why. My attempts at building gdb and using it from that old Soviet site hasn’t met with much luck.

Oh, and it was easier to massage some make files with gnumake.

But it does run!

If anyone want’s to give it a whirl it’s available here.

Zork lives on the Altair!

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Ok, I can’t sleep so I thought I’d rummage through the dungeon of Zork…

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.