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Infocom V3 interpreter


Wrathchild

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Hi all,

 

Thanks to the UK bank holiday weekend, I've had a major coding bash

and completed the relocation of the "HitchHiker's Guide" interpreter

to the 8K cart range ($A000->$BF00). Thus far, you can play the game

using the disk images in an emulator. Hmm... not so impressive. :roll:

 

There's almost 1K of code space left in which to add the hooks to

use a cart's banks rather than the disk drive, so thats the next stage.

This will require a 1Mbit cart (128K bytes = 110K game + 8K engine).

 

After that, I can try and make other Infocom titles work with this engine.

This should be OK as I picked this title because the coding looked tidier

than in some of the games. :wink:

 

Finally, we can look at 4MBit carts to get 4 titles in total on 1 cart. 8)

 

Greetings,

 

Mark

frotz.zip

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Hi all,

Thanks to the UK bank holiday weekend, I've had a major coding bash  

and completed the relocation of the "HitchHiker's Guide" interpreter  

to the 8K cart range ($A000->$BF00). Thus far, you can play the game  

using the disk images in an emulator. Hmm... not so impressive.  :roll:  

 

Pretty damn good if you ask me. :D Keep us updated on the work, I will be happy to test it out one of my 8Mbit cartridges if you get that far.

 

There is also some 6502 code in the maxflash kit that might work with very little modification and be well under 1K.

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Hi again,

 

Well, the swap over to holding the data in ROM was simple enough,

I've disabled the messages 'Insert Disk 2' at the start and 'Re-Insert Game disk' after saving. Hopefully saving/loading should be OK, I'll take this upload a chance for free beta testing. :P What about cassette support? 8)

 

As there was a spare 8K bank, I've top off the rom with a title pic that I've just spent a couple of hours getting right. If I wasn't so lazy then I'd have made it more colourful, but it'll do for now. :D

 

The scheme used is XEGS 128K, I like this as the 8K game engine resides in $A000 and the data is swapped into $8000 as required. Changing this to the 16K model ($8000->$BFFF) shouldn't be a problem though, as long as the engine is placed in ROM then more RAM is available for the games, i.e. you could play them on a 32K machine.

 

Bearing in mind the nature of the sources, a reverse engineer rather than a clean-room implementation of the Frotz engine, I'm reluctant to let them out at this point, but may email Activision to ask for thier permission.

 

Finally, those of you with a hex editor could try placing other z3 files into the rom and see what else you can play. 8) (You may want to NOP out the call to the title screen though... or make your own :) )

 

Good luck, and post the results back here!

 

Regards,

 

Mark

frotz_hhg.zip

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