Article 1846 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.exodus.net!uunet!in2.uu.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!cwi.nl!dik From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) Subject: Re: Adventure (Was: The Computer Museum) Message-ID: Sender: news@cwi.nl (The Daily Dross) Nntp-Posting-Host: chrysant.cwi.nl Organization: CWI, Amsterdam References: <960319054842@fwancho.whc.net> <4iqlgf$hhk@tricia.msn.fullfeed.com> <4j3409$2o2@dns.plano.net> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 01:19:46 GMT Lines: 48 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:1846 alt.folklore.computers:56556 In article <4j3409$2o2@dns.plano.net> Charles Richmond writes: > It is interesting that you would mention Lauren Weinstein. He posted some > messages about five years ago concerning the original subject of this > thread--Adventure. Evidently he had hacked some Adventure code (at Stanford?) UCLA > back when Adventure first came out. He had some very interesting stories to > relate--perhaps he can repost some of them. He had been hacking with the source a bit and extended the game slightly. (I think it was the C source by Jim@rank-xerox, and not the original Fortran source.) This extended version accidentally got into one of the BSD Unix distributions (and that was the version I first played). Later BSD distributions had the original again. Actually the extended version had a bug: "Please tell lauren@ucla-security that fatal bug 25 happened." which you got in some situations at the bottom of the volcano. (Going North was not a particular good idea, the "travels" array was not properly defined.) The situation with Zork/Dungeon and BSD Unix is also quite interesting. At one stage an RSX-11 executable was ported to V6 Unix by some hacker. Nearly all commands worked properly, the only things that did not work were saving and restoring games but some additional hacks had given replacements for that. (And if I remember right the time command dumped core.) This executable was hacked again into a V7 Unix executable (some system calls, especially the write system call, had been changed between V6 and V7). [And that was the one I have hacked back once upon a time into a V6 executable to run on a PDP 11/34.] This V7 version was the one that you had on a VAX with BSD Unix, it had a wrapper around it to put the machine in PDP compatibility mode. However, in one of the BSD 4.1 distributions (I think it was 4.1b or somesuch), it had been replaced by a native running version which had a slight extension (the puzzle room). Later BSD distributions had again the original PDP executable, so the puzzle room lived only a short time in BSD Unix (I think it must have been less than a year). Somewhere in my archive on tape I still must have all those executables. In a later stage I have taken the PDP executable and decompiled it into something resembling Fortran. This one I translated into a version of Pascal, with a compiler adapted to my purpose (in addition to the type CHAR it also needed to know the type ASCIICHAR with constant-denotations supporting that, and also interactive files of that type), and I put it up on a CDC Cyber. And in a later stage I did also add the puzzle room. Sweet memories. -- dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924098 home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/