I supposed I should have figured this out earlier, but there just isn’t enough SRAM for the zip interpreter to run the Zork I story file. Â It is trying to malloc() approximately 30KB of ram for various data structures, and the poor little Arduino Mega only has 8. Â It might be possible to […]
As I said in a previous post, It looks like a standard Arduino just doesn’t have enough memory, so I found an Arduino Mega, which is based on the ATMega 1280 rather than the 328. However, when I got the Mega from MakerBot Industries, it refused to accept any new program uploads. Â Every time I […]
While the original phone I bought for this project is uber-cool, the fact remains that it’s not quite period appropriate to the time when Zork was at its peak (1977-1983). Â So a little time wandering though the world’s biggest bazaar showed me an alternative. Â It came labeled as “No Sound from ringer, works okay” […]
The key to making this project work is allowing it to communicate with the old TDD. Â To do that, I’ve managed to acquire a couple of TDD modems, specifically designed to talk to TDDs. Â The Intellimodem can even do Baudot, which the TDD does (at 45.5 baud[*]). More after the break
So, by commiting acts of unspeakable hackery, I’ve gotten it small enough to load onto the Arduino: Of course it doesn’t run, but that’s a different hurdle.
So after much hacking away, I’ve finally gotten the zip code to compile under the Arduino IDE. Â But it doesn’t quite fit.
When gutting the phone, I went to the trouble to preserve the hook and PTT switch infrastructure. I’m still not sure how I’m going to use them, but I figure that it’d be good to know how they work. With the help of my trusty cat Ezra, I carefully stripped the end of all the […]
Part converting the code for use being fed to a TDD is to make it a long stream, rather than a pretty curses(3) based interface. This means that all the trouble the developers spent on making lines wrap cleanly, and providing vertical breaks between elements is lost.
So I started with this phone, but it’s full of phone guts that aren’t going to help the project at all.
Since my original concept was to power this with an Arduino microcontroller platform, I’ve decided to see if I can power it with an Arduino Pro from Sparkfun. Why Arduino? Why not code to the bare uC? Â Arduino has got a nice IDE, which makes development easier, and it’s got lots of pluggable hardware that […]