The Halls Of ZK

Overview

Tired of the same old pirates, thieves, Cyclops, wizards, dragons, horsemen, chiefs, spiders, weasel-like aliens and dungeon masters? Tired of traveling in spaceships, magic boats, magic barrels, spinning rooms and time machines? Tired of telling the robot where to go? Tired of paying $$$$ for personal computer games you can't even relate to? Have we got an escape for you?!

Announcing 'The Halls Of ZK', the original interactive fiction game written exclusively for OpenVMS! The Halls Of ZK is a sophisticated adventure game which takes place at Digital's Spitbrook software engineering facility. Meet famous Spitbrook personalities! Incredible treasures and mind-boggling encounters await you. Exercise your computer-related skills to solve the myriad of obstacles that lead to the acquisition of the ultimate treasure!

The Halls of ZK was written by William Lees and Edmund Sullivan sometime in August 1985. Since that time a VAX binary and a VEST'd Alpha binary (with some source) has been floating around the 'net at various websites. Recently the full source code, including the source for the Interactive Fiction Compiler (IFC) was located by John Reagan. The code generator for IFC was re-written to output MACRO-32 source modules by Tim Sneddon and as such there are now native versions for all OpenVMS supported architectures available.

The Future

A lot has changed since this game was written. HP has completely moved out of the Spitbrook facility. Intel, Oracle and others have taken up residence as parts of Digital were sold off to unsuspecting buyers. Even the barcode changed. Is there anyone out there interested in collaborating on a revision of The Halls Of ZK, maybe something titled, 'The Halls Of ZK: Return to Spitbrook'? If you are, then please join the ZK mailing list (details below) and express your interest.

Documentation

For those users out there who have more important things to do than work out just how to get out of the maze, or start the VAX then the walkthrough might be the things for you.

The Halls Of ZK Walkthrough HTML

The Halls Of ZK is listed at the following interactive fiction databases:

The Interactive Fiction Database

Software

The latest version of The Halls Of ZK can be downloaded below. It is a VMSINSTAL kit that has been broken up into architecture specific parts. Download those portions that are relevant to you. It is possible that the BACKUP savset file attributes may be scrambled. To correct this download this DCL procedure, RESET_BACKUP_SAVSET_ATTRIBUTES.COM and execute it, passing the saveset name as the first parameter.

A: VMSINSTAL kit (including documentation) BCK|ZIP
B: OpenVMS VAX images BCK|ZIP
C: OpenVMS Alpha images BCK|ZIP
D: OpenVMS I64 images BCK|ZIP

Complete source kit (requires Pascal and BLISS compilers) BCK|ZIP

If for some reason you are unable to install ZK system wide, then download the saveset for your specific system and install it locally, like so:

$ BACKUP ZK011.n/SAVE_SET [] $ ZK == "$SYS$DISK:[]ZK$MAIN" $ ZK

The following is the complete source kit for X1.0-823 as a zipped BACKUP saveset:

ZK X1.0-832 source kit ZIP

Source Code

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Support

The Halls Of ZK does not come with any warranty and is provided entirely "as is". There is also no formal support available. If you have questions, queries or something doesn't work for you then please join The Halls Of ZK Mailing List and post your query there. To subscribe to this mailing list simply send email to ZK-List-request@kednos.com containing the the single command 'SUBSCRIBE'.