Confusion: A MDL interpreter (or, "How to Fit a Small Program into a Large Machine") ======================================================= This is Matthew Russotto's MDL interpreter, ported to Microsoft Windows by David Kinder. Quoting from Matthew's description: For those poor souls still stuck in dawn of IF history, I present "Confusion" -- a MDL interpreter which works just well enough to play the original Zork all the way through. Running Confusion ----------------- Confusion on Windows is a console-mode program: that is, it is run from the Command Prompt (coloquially sometimes referred to as a DOS window). To use it, open a new command prompt and navigate to the directory containing the file MDLI.EXE that came along with this file, then run it. You should see something like this: >mdli Welcome to 'Confusion', a MDL interpreter. Copyright 2009 Matthew T. Russotto This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type . This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute under certain conditions; type for details LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 1 PROCESS 1 _ The flashing _ is the cursor waiting for input: enter some valid MDL command, such as the suggested "type ", then hit enter. Press CTRL+C to exit the interpreter. Running MDL Zork ---------------- The main point of Confusion is to play the original MDL version of Zork. The Zork sources, somewhat modified for the limitations Confusion, are available at http://www.russotto.net/~mrussotto/confusion/mdlzork.tgz Unpack this archive, and copy the MDLI.EXE directory to the same place. Open a Command Prompt and go to this directory. We now need to initialize the game by running MDLI and entering as the first command This should, after some processing, produce output like this: >mdli Welcome to 'Confusion', a MDL interpreter. Copyright 2009 Matthew T. Russotto This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type . This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute under certain conditions; type for details LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 1 PROCESS 1 prim.mud loaded defs.mud loaded makstr.mud loaded tell-repl.mud loaded act1.mud loaded act2.mud loaded act3.mud loaded act4.mud loaded disp1.mud loaded parser.mud loaded melee.mud loaded rooms.mud loaded dung.mud loaded impl.mud loaded sr.mud loaded syntax.mud loaded typhak.mud loaded util.mud loaded This Zork created August 2, 2009. West of House This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door. "DONE" >_ If the above output appears then congratulations, you're running MDL Zork! This will also have written out a new "MDL\MADADV.SAVE" file, containing an image of the game. In future you can re-load the initialized game image by running MDLI with its "-r" option, like so >mdli -r MDL\MADADV.SAVE Welcome to 'Confusion', a MDL interpreter. Copyright 2009 Matthew T. Russotto This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type . This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute under certain conditions; type for details This Zork created August 2, 2009. West of House This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door. >_ Note that the MDL Zork sources come with a "MDL\MADADV.SAVE" file, but this appears not to work as-is: possibly it was generated by Matthew with an earlier, incompatible version of the MDLI interpreter. Patching the Original MDL Zork ------------------------------ As an alternative to the above link, the original, unmodified MDL Zork sources can be downloaded from here http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html These will need to have Matthew's patches applied. These can be downloaded from the IF-Archive: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXmdlXinterpretersXconfusion.html Building Confusion ------------------ For details of how to build Confusion on Windows, see the files in the "source" directory.