Last week, I was searching through my parents’ garage, looking for some old gray box Infocom games. I didn’t find them, but I might have found something better.
My dad did some work for Atari back in the day, which must’ve been how he ended up with these:
Conventional wisdom has it that building Cornerstone on top of a brand new VM was a massive blunder, since it was only ever released for the PC, and the VM was never used for any other products. And yet, this claims to be Cornerstone for Atari.
I’ve never owned an Atari computer myself, but the local vintage computer club was kind enough to help me make images of the disks. Hopefully someone here knows what to do with them!
I completely fell for this one, unlike the other thread which was a bit over the top and was pretty obvious. But now I need to ask … did your dad really used to work for Atari, and that website is correct, or did you one day happen to notice somebody with the same surname as you and thought it could be used today?
I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here (judging by the speed, I’m guessing x86 emulation of the original PC binaries?) Haven’t figured out how to import the Zork database yet.
Bravo, @vaporware! I do hope you’ll share something about how it all works.
EDIT: FYI, I think maybe you’re supposed to be able to restore from backup on drive B: (the “ZORK” disk) within Cornerstone, but when I tried it the instance of Cornerstone seemed to crash (Atari call trace output?). That may be due to version issues with hatari and/or using EmuTOS instead of a copy of the real binary.
That’s really him. I don’t know if he literally worked for Atari, but he did work with them on that project. He was a pretty big deal in the world of commercial holography.
I did not, in fact, find these disks in a box in my parents’ garage. This isn’t really a lost Infocom port of Cornerstone to Atari ST or Amiga.
But it is Cornerstone, running on the Atari ST and Amiga. Not the original binaries running in an emulator; not some kind of intricate, fake Cornerstone simulation.
I did it the easy way: by reverse-engineering the VM and building a new tool ecosystem from scratch.
This is Linchpin, an implementation of Cornerstone’s VM, serving the same purpose as MME.EXE in the original Cornerstone for DOS. It comes in three flavors:
Linchpin, written in C# for Windows/Mac/Linux. Includes a disassembler.
LinchpinST, a C port using m68k-*-gcc for the Atari ST and Amiga.
Linchpin128, another C port using llvm-mos for the Commodore 128. Requires an REU and only implements enough to run Zork.
Speaking of which, another confession: as far as I know, Infocom never made a “Zork for Cornerstone”, either.
I did that using Chisel, an assembler for Cornerstone’s VM, together with a new ZILF backend that produces Chisel assembly. It uses an approach similar to the existing “Glulx16” mode to compile unmodified ZIL code, at the cost of some performance.
Source code and VM documentation will be forthcoming over the next few days. For now, here are .NET binaries of Linchpin and Chisel, along with some example code:
Actually I toyed in past with the idea of abusing programs NOT intended for IF (ex. indeed, database programs), the general idea being along the lines of Activision’s Portal (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2164/portal/)
Luckily, Cornerstone’s documentation floats in the IF Archive:
so, an interactive “explore the database” style IF is not only feasible, (oh, what about implementing Enciclopedia Frobozzica with Cornerstone ?), but at least two Infocom-era IF is amenable to database-style follow up in the style of the above-mentioned Portal: Bureaucracy (the namesake, by definition, (mis)handles databases…) and Border Zone (espionage involves intelligence collection and handling, the ideal hacker narrative…)
Here’s a tidbit. I dug through my backlog of Infocom data, trying to find anything more about Cornerstone. All I could find was this quote:
Currently, we have three types of interpreters: ZIP (for Zork Interpretive Program) which runs the games, MME (for Mu Machine Emulator) which runs Cornerstone, and DIP (for Display Interpretive Program) which runs Fooblitzky.
I think the term “Mu Machine” has gone unnoticed until now. (“DIP” is mentioned here.)
Huh. It rings a bell, but I don’t remember where I’ve seen it before.
I was thinking Muddle Machine, since the VM seems designed to run MDL - it has a sentinel “false” value, and a version of setjmp/longjmp that lines up perfectly with PROG/AGAIN/RETURN.
One fun thing about the μ-Machine is its ability to carry megabytes of data, paving the way for abuses like this:
One thing it lacks, however, is sub-second timing. This demo runs fast enough to do 20 fps, but the animation is meant for 15 fps, so hitting that target takes some fancy delay looping.
I never intended to collect Cornerstone files, only games. But now people will go looking, and my page is an obvious place to look. So I might as well. I’m already ignoring Infocom Microsoft copyrights, right?
Are those the same versions that everybody else has? This is the first time I’ve tried to find Cornerstone.
Compile Linchpin (either the POSIX or .NET version)
Unzip either version of Cornerstone
Copy the two files Cornerstone/CORNER.MME and Cornerstone/CORNER.OBJ to the Cornerstone directory in Linchpin;
Create a Sample directory in Linchpin, and copy all files from Sample to it.
Then, to run it:
# For the .NET interpreter:
./src/Linchpin/bin/Debug/net10.0/Linchpin run --mme Cornerstone/CORNER.MME
# For the native interpreter:
./src/LinchpinST/bin/linchpin_st run Cornerstone/CORNER.MME
