MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - The status of Ms Gorf?

I occasionally wonder what's up with this as well. According to Jamie's website, she has the rights to Ms. Gorf, so there shouldn't be a Crazy Otto type situation.

I know that Al Kossow from the Computer History Museum got some disks from Jamie, and was able to get at least some data off of them. But I'm not sure if ever specifically identified the Ms. Gorf source code. Even if we had the source code, it might be difficult to compile it into a playable game. But certainly if it were publicly released the odds would be much higher.

I'll include a couple of posts Al made to the Astrocade Yahoo group, which is the most detailed publicly released information I'm aware of. Until I looked it up, I didn't realize it had been so long since I'd heard anything. These messages are from June 1, 2011. Has anyone talked to Al and/or Jamie lately?

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ballyalley/conversations/messages/10806

Quote:

"Hello, I'm Al Kossow, Software Curator at the Computer History Museum.

Jamie and I worked together at Apple in the 80's, and a few months ago I offered
to try to read the disks that she had in storage.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I had a chance to get through about 2/3 of them.
The date range appears to be from 1979-1983. They begin with CP/M disks, which
were pretty easy to recover, but the bulk of the 'interesting' ones are stand-alone
TERSE disks, single sided single density 1K sector/ 4 sectors. I'm guessing they
contain the code for Wizard of Wor, Gorf, and Robbie Roto.

So the problem is how to analyze the TERSE disks. There is an early version under
CP/M, which might be a start. I guess a better knowledge of what exactly the hardware
was used in this time period that these were written on would be very helpful to get
a system simulation running for recovery.

The big unknown is what the 1983 hardware was, and why it seems to be writing a
non-standard sector format. The best I've been able to come up with so far is the
5" floppies seem to be 1K sector 2 sector disks, so I'm guessing it was also a
standalone TERSE environment.

So, any detailed information would be of help.

The good news is that so far I haven't had a problem reading the disks once I
was able to figure out what the sector format was.

So far, I haven't seen many disks with personal files on them. I am more concerned
about the later ones where I can't really tell what is there. One thing on them
is the sector data appears to be bit-inverted. There is text (ie. chunks of FORTH
looking code) once I do that."

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ballyalley/conversations/messages/10805

[This one was posted by Adam Trionfo.]

Quote:

"I received the source code listing [for the Astrocade BASIC cartridge] from Al Kossow of BitSavers.org. He was able to pull this off of some CP/M disks from Jamie Fenton. Al has given me permission to post to the group some information that he pasted along to me. It is my hope that the group can help him out better than I can:

Today, June 1, 2011, I wrote to Al,
Quote:

"I know that there is one member of the Bally Alley discussion group that has been trying to get the TERSE source code for Wizard of Wor for a LONG time. Did you get all the disks that Jamie had in her storage?"

Here is Al's reply:

Quote:

yes, it is there
this all started because someone wanted to try to find the code for MS Gorf.

Unfortunately, it appears to be on 5" floppies which is in an odd format
Some of the 8" disks from 1983 aren't in a normal format either. I think they may be for a Kontron development system.

how much is known about TERSE?

I have floppies from an early CP/M version, and a lot of disk images for the 1K sector standalone TERSE development system.

There are also a handful of header files for a version of ZGRASS on the CP/M disks, but not all the code"