*BSD News Article 51735


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From: baf@laraby.tiac.net (Carl Muckenhoupt)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: xyzzy
Date: 21 Sep 95 03:15:08 GMT
Organization: The Internet Access Company
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shoppa@altair.krl.caltech.edu (Tim Shoppa) writes:

>My memory's hazy, but didn't the non-PDP-11 distributions of BSD 
>once come with a PDP-11 emulator of sorts whose only purpose in life
>was to run a binary executable of Dungeon?  (Dungeon later got pared
>back, split up, and came out as the Zork trilogy for micros.)
>Was the full Dungeon source code (in Fortran) ever made publicly available?
>Maybe it's at one of the if-archive sites?  I've got the source to a
>version that runs under RT-11 and RSX-11 Fortran IV, but it seems to
>only include roughly what came in the first Zork.

Well, that could be because you haven't seen the non-Zork 1 parts.  Most 
of the central area wast used in Zork 1.
The basic design of the trilogy was this:
Zork 1:  When it was designed, they weren't thinking in terms of a 
trilogy.  They just wanted to do a port of Dungeon to the new 
microcomputers.  But it was too big.  So they cut a big section out of the 
middle of the map and said "This is Zork for micros."
Zork 2:  Not having enough material left for an entire game, they came up 
with new stuff to glue together the bits that were left out of Zork 1.  
The result is composed about half of stuff from Dungeon, half of new 
material.
Zork 3:  At this point, only a few puzzles from the original are left 
unused.  They use them, and write an entirely new game to set them in.

--
Carl Muckenhoupt | Is it true that Kibo habitually autogreps all of Usenet
baf@tiac.net     | for his name?  If so:  Hi, Kibo.  Like the sig?