SALTO – The Xerox Alto Simulator | Hacker News Reader

SALTO – The Xerox Alto Simulator

toastytech.com

62 pointsdragonbonheur10 comments

When i was growing up, my Dad worked at Xerox PARC and on some of the early Alto projects. He would bring me and my brother to the office on weekends and we would get to play on these computers (mostly MazeWar). We played a text adventure game called Haunt, that I have been trying to find again for 35+ years now. Has anyone here possibly heard of the game Haunt???

Is this the game you played: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT

It's written in OPS5, a rule system built on Lisp, so I imagine it would be straightforward to get it running. Source code: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/haunt.ops5

Though that's the source code of the incomplete port.

On twenex.org you can play what seems to be the full game (only preserved in binary form.)

There's supposed to be more info on http://wiki.twenex.org/tutorials:haunt but that server is down at the moment.

Thanks guys, yes this is the game I was looking for. I am going to keep trying twenex.org for a while and see if the site comes back up. I really appreciate the info!

I ended up making an account at twenex.org and looking at the games. It appears they took Haunt off of the games list. Anyway, thanks again for the help!

If you're looking for an Alto simulator (and who isn't?), you should definitely use ContrAlto rather than Salto. I used both simulators while restoring an Alto. ContrAlto is much more reliable and provide tools for examining the Alto's internal behavior, while Salto tends to crash after a few minutes. The only drawback to ContrAlto is it is in C# and only works on Windows.

I wrote instructions on using ContrAlto here: http://www.righto.com/2016/10/simulating-xerox-alto-with-con...

If it's in C# why isn't it platform independent? Any insights?

the readme says it kid of works: "As ContrAlto is a .NET application and has no Windows-specific dependencies, it will also run under Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/) on Unix and MacOS, however this usage has many rough edges at the moment -- please file bugs if you find them "

you also have the JS port: https://github.com/sethm/ContrAltoJS

I tried ContrAlto on Mono on a Mac and it died almost immediately. The author said that there are some pretty serious bugs in the OS X version of Mono’s WinForms support that break it, as well as a Mono bug that mangles keystroke mappings so the shift key doesn't work. He recommended I use Windows - ContrAlto worked without problems so I gave up on using Mono.

Super cool

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