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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!travelers.mail.cornell.edu!news.tc.cornell.edu!newsserver.sdsc.edu!news.cerf.net!nntp-server.caltech.edu!altair.krl.caltech.edu!shoppa From: shoppa@altair.krl.caltech.edu (Tim Shoppa) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction,comp.unix.bsd.misc Subject: Re: xyzzy Date: 19 Sep 1995 20:26:37 GMT Organization: Kellogg Radiation Lab, Caltech Lines: 28 Message-ID: <43n91t$4nh@gap.cco.caltech.edu> References: <43ld3a$2ka@ub.d.umn.edu> <43m79t$86k@crl4.crl.com> <43mi05$2h6@newsflash.concordia.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: altair.krl.caltech.edu Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au alt.folklore.computers:88283 rec.games.int-fiction:7394 comp.unix.bsd.misc:230 In article <43mi05$2h6@newsflash.concordia.ca>, Joachim Thiemann <joachim@ece.concordia.ca> wrote: >Jason A. Wells (jawells@crl.com) proclaimed to us: >: Christopher G Busch (cbusch@ub.d.umn.edu) wrote: > >: : Where did the "spell" xyzzy originally come from. I remember it from an >: : old text adventure game. Now I see it occasionally. > >: Both "XYZZY" and PLUGH came from the Colossal Cave Adventure game, >: originally desgined on (I believe) a PDP-10 in FORTRAN by WIlliam Crowther >: as a cave simulation, and later improved by Don Woods who added puzzles, >: magical items, and the like. There are still copies available in the >: /if-archive directory of ftp.gmd.de site. > >AFAIK, most BSD-ish systems (and NetBSD for sure) still have adventure >as part of their games distribution. Check ftp://ftp.netbsd.org or one >of the mirrors.. 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. Tim. (shoppa@altair.krl.caltech.edu)