As promised, I have just about done with the ARM BASIC version of the interpreter and you can download a disc image here.

As the program is written in ARM BASIC, you need to use the ARM Co-Pro option in BeebEm to use it.

The image is a bootable DFS double sided image with Zork1 and THHGTTG on there.

To select which game to play, you will need to manually edit line 50 of the program and change accordingly.

It is still a bit slow in places but just about playable.

There may still be a few bugs in there so let me know if it crashes.

I'll start with the 6502 conversion soon.

Enjoy !

Jon.

Woooh!

How have you managed this in less than a week?!?!

OK, I can run both Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Haven't spent a lot of time on Zork, but I've just played through the first part of HHGTTG. I got 25/400 points, and it seems to be working perfectly!

Then I got a bit greedy. I tried Stationfall which is one of the largest v3 Infocom games. That produced an exception. Then, I remembered you said you *might* limit it to v3 machines later, but that it should actually support later versions atm. Most of the IF Archive Inform games are released as version 5 z-machines, so I copied across three v5 games - each bigger than the last, until I eventually tried Last Days of Doom, which I was surprised to discover fit on a disk! All of them crashed out too - exceptions included below.

Finally, I tried to run CZECH: Comprehensive Z-machine Emulation CHecker 0.8 against it to see how many tests it would pass. Unfortunately, that crashed out with:



Soo ... should any v5 games work? Is it the size of the files I've tried that's the likely culprit? Or is it just that we'll have to beta-test each game individually?

Feedback so far ... it looks frickin' cool!

Apart from listing potential new features, which I won't do here - the only things I can think of to comment on this demo:

1) Speed is obviously a bit of an issue. Though it's definitely playable and certainly no slower than some beeb adventures - e.g. Melbourne House ones.

2) The text splits at the end of the line, instead of at the end of a word. I think you've already mentioned this, tho.

Other than that and the compatibility with other games - it's looking *really* cool!!!

Sam.

Stationfall [stationf.z3]



Adventure [Advent.z5]



ZDungeon [zdungeon.z5]



Last Days of Doom [LDoDoom.z5]

Thanks for the comprehensive testing and reports.

At the moment, I am only supporting version 3 so I didn't expect version 5 game files to work.

There is no reason why I can't add support upto version 8 but I guess I was a little lazy and didn't bother to code the bits which said IF VERSION <= 3 DO THIS ELSE DO THE OTHER. I'll take a look and see if I can add more compatibility with later versions.

I'll also take a look at the other points you raised and get back when I have something to report.

Do you have a download link for Station Fall ?

You didn't mention the status bar - like it ?

Jon.

Just to let you know, this seems to work fine on B-em as well.

Absolutely. It's the least I can do!

Well, v3 file support alone is fine, if that's all the beeb can handle. It just means that the majority of the games available from the IF Archive won't work. Those that include source code could be recompiled to v3, but many of them are just the .z5 files so they would probably remain unplayable. If it's possible to run those v5 games, great. If not, no worries. Keep me up to date on which ones you expect to work, tho, and that'll save me trying out ones which definitely won't work. (Support for v6 - v8 is probably unnecessary).

I didn't mention the status bar ... mainly because it's perfect.

It looks just like the original.

Sam.

I've only got BeebEm 3.3 - i don't think this has Arm co-pro support does it?

Depends. What platform are you running it on? Mac BeebEm got support in version 3.2, whilst Jon contributed the ARM second processor support to the Windows version in version 3.7. BeebEm for UNIX doesn't support the ARM second processor at all (yet).

If you're on Windows, can't you just upgrade your copy of BeebEm?

Sam.