DND for VMS
-----------

For you who are fluent in VMS system
management, much of this information is
overly simplified.

For you who are not, it is overly terse.
But hey, you have to start somewhere!

VMS was my first real operating system
I encountered way back in the early 80-ies.
DND took up a LOT of my time at the university.
I guess I slipped at least 6 months thanks to it.
Every teleporter, every hidden door and every pit
for every cave is in my green game book from back
then. Even today I can get the ORB at Shvenks lair 
as a level 8 or 9 magic user.

Did you know that if you are a fighter and read
the text PERSISTANTLY at the throne you can get 
spells? And if you save and list players at the
game parser you show up as F/MU?
If you are REALLY lucky, some of the spells are
permanent. Most are one time spells only though.

Enough about that. Here comes the glorious
DND/DUNGDRAG for VAX/VMS. (It probably started
as DUNGDRAG and was called DND only later).

The Dungdrag distribution:
--------------------------
This is a very archaic version of DND.
It feels like one of the first attempts.

-Warren is not completed and is called DEATH.

-The not-system does not work. It crashes the
game.

-Treasure vaults does not work either, except
that they give you various of electrical
shocks, or leave you alone.

You create a character for a particular
cave and then you can never enter another
cave with it. If you like to explore other
caves, you have to create another character.

only UPPERRCASE works. If you try to tell
the game something in lowercase, the game
does not understand.

The Dnd distribution:
---------------------
This game is slightly newer, but just slightly.
The only apparent difference is that a generated 
character can enter any cave when reentering the 
game. 

Otherwise: See above.


Both distributions:
-------------------

I have supplied an empty character file and
a ditto orb file. Copy the empties over the
live ones and you have zeroed out the game.
You can copy only one and you zero out that
function.
Examples:

$copy dndorb.bak dndorb.; (zeros out the
'high score' list).
33_
$copy dndchr.bak dndchr.; (zeos out the
saved characters).

The distribution files:
-----------------------
The two files:
'rx33_1.dsk' and 'rx33_2.dsk'
are image copies of DEC's RX33 diskettes.
The labels are 'DND' and 'DUNGDRAG'.

- Rx33_1.dsk contains DND.
- RX33_2.dsk contains DUNGDRAG.

You can either create new ones with DD on an 
ULTRIX system that has such a drive in hardware,
and the actual diskettes will be mountable on 
a VAX/VMS system. 

Another version is to get hold of a VAX emulator.
A good choice would be SIMH that is available from:
http://simh.trailing-edge.com

SIMH runs on a variety of different operating
systems. It is available in source form for
all computers and pre compiled versions are
available for those unfortunate souls that are
forced to use Windows 2000 and newer.

Observe! In order to have ethernet support,
you also need libpcap libraries (in the wonderfull
world of Windoze called WINPcap. Here you also need
a dedicated Ethernet card for the emulator!).

Even if you bring home the pre compiled versions,
do get hold of the source as well since there is
useful documentation there.

Here is an example of how the SIMH setups looks
like on my emulated machine:
set cpu 64m
set rq0 ra82
set rq1 ra82
set rq2 rx33
set q3 rx33
set xq MAC=08:00:2b:01:23:45
attach rq0 rpcsys.dsk
attach rq1 rpcusr.dsk
attach rq2 rx33_1.dsk
attach rq3 rx33_2.dsk
attach xq0 eth2
boot cpu

For further information, see the SIMH
documentation. If you do not know what an RA82
is, you could possibly find that out at the
trailing edge project home page.

Once the monitor has booted (you will get a 
prompt that looks like this, after a test
sequence has counted down to 3: >>>),
you do:
>>> boot dua0:

The system then boots.
You are then on your own but in the old
days the default super user name was:
SYSTEM
with the password:
MANAGER

To mount the diskette images you do:
$MOUNT DUA2: DND DND
$MOUNT DUA3: DUNGDRAG DUNGDRAG

To go to the respective place of the games
you do:
$SET DEFAULT DUA2:<000000.DND>
Or:
$SET DEFAULT DUA3:<000000.DUNGDRAG>

Useful commands are:
$DIR
$RUN DUNGDRAG
and
$RUN DND

To shutdown the system you do:
$shutdown now

There is also a useful VMS command called:
$HELP

^Y stops programs.

Good luck!
/Lars Persson, Sun Microsystems