Re: Z-code Family Tree, portability, copyrights


4 Jul 1995 13:26:08 -0400

In article <D91TAN.95Jul3214303@Banjul.DoCS.UU.SE>,
Torbj|rn Andersson <d91tan@Student.DoCS.UU.SE> wrote:
}But I'd be selfish if I didn't recognize the efforts of Andrew Plotkin
}(if I had a better computer, I'd most certainly give MaxZip a try), as
}well as those of Matthew Russotto (whose zip port, while rather
}minimalistic, seems to work very well for most things I've tried) and,
}of course, Mark Howell.

I'm glad SOMEONE likes it :-). Seriously, my port is minimalistic
partly (well, mostly) by laziness and partly by design. I wanted to retain the
look-n-feel of the Infocom games I played back on my old Apple II+.
Some of the things I haven't put in (such as proportional fonts, which
were supported by the later Infocom interpreters) are out of laziness,
and maybe I'll look into Andrew's XZip for some ideas on how to do
those while retaining the single window. Others are just in the "I
didn't see a need" vein, such as preferences mapping the Infocom
styles into Mac styles-- that's a very good idea. Another problem
is that some games (Beyond Zork in particular, as well as the V6
games) depend very strongly on the original font sizes, window sizes,
etc, being intact. I do plan to, one of these days, release a port
which can play the V6 games -- after my third rewrite of the I/O
package. I've got one now but my first attempt at a pixel-based I/O
package was pretty poor.