UCSD p-Trek: Porting a fairly large program to a fairly small system

I just spent a couple of weeks porting a VAX Fortran version of the 70s “Super Star Trek” text-based computer game to the “Fortran 77” version of the standalone UCSD p-System that was one of the 3 original operating systems for the IBM PC.

The PC emulator is a recent version of Hampa Hug’s PCE (configured with 4 floppy drives, which would have been a bit of a stretch for original PC hardware).

The p-System distribution disks came from Bitsavers (supplemented by a Pascal system from Yahoo I found a few years ago).

Frankly, I didn’t really expect this to work, but it does seems to be (more-or-less) working. I’ve written it all up and put the results on GitHub:

“Super Star Trek” running on the UCSD p-System on the PCE IBM 5150 emulator on an ARM-based Mac Mini, via Wine 10.0 and the Rosetta 2 x86-to-ARM translator:

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