
SALTO – The Xerox Alto Simulator - dragonbonheur
http://toastytech.com/guis/salto.html
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charn3
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???

~~~
kens
Is this the game you played:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAUNT](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](http://www.ifarchive.org/if-
archive/games/source/haunt.ops5)

~~~
pdw
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](http://wiki.twenex.org/tutorials:haunt)
but that server is down at the moment.

~~~
charn3
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!

~~~
charn3
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!

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kens
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...](http://www.righto.com/2016/10/simulating-xerox-alto-with-
contralto.html)

~~~
13of40
If it's in C# why isn't it platform independent? Any insights?

~~~
kens
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.

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corndoge
Super cool

