Complete walkthrough of the OpenVMS (formerly VAX/VMS) text adventure “The Halls of ZK” (1985-2013). From what I can gather, this game was originally developed and released as “ZK” in 1985 by Edmund Sullivan and William Lees for native VAX hardware. It was then converted to architecture-independent code, updated and released by Tim Sneddon for all OpenVMS platforms, with the latest version released in 2013 at the time of writing. It can be played online at hallsofzk.org/ where further background information is also available.
I originally installed a ZK binary on the OpenVMS student package which is based on a DEC Alpha emulator. However, I found some bugs triggering access violations when I tried to look into the ball (to solve the petty cash safe puzzle), or save a game. This made the game incompletable on my local system without bugfixes. I later instead investigated re-compiling the Pascal game source with a view to locating the bugs, however I found that the OpenVMS student package I had downloaded did not have a Pascal compiler available by default. So finally, I played it using the online version, hosted on a system using VAX architecture which does not have these bugs and is fully completable.
I am very grateful that the online version of this game is still up and running as of 2020 so it can still be enjoyed. Although I have no connection with DEC or the ZK site, it is to me very reminiscent of the time when I used VAX/VMS as an undergraduate student in the early 90s. This was back when I was ostensibly doing some Fortran and C programming in university computing labs here in the UK, sometimes late at night.
This walkthrough is based on the original text solution at github.com/tesneddon/zk/blob/... which appears to be for an earlier version of the game.
I have created an updated text solution specifically for the version of the game solved in this video, available at drive.google.com/file/d/1yaAI...