Re: Zip interpreter question


Mon, 7 Aug 1995 19:18:08 GMT

In <807750401snz@wing-it.demon.co.uk>, Ian Smith <Ian@wing-it.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Greetings All,
>
> This is a plea to anyone with more C experience than me (which includes
>almost all of you...)
>
> I play my LToI games on my Atari Portfolio palmtop pc. No big shakes
>there. This is made possible because the LToI setup allows you to disable the
>status line. Then I found the archive, and a bunch of z5 games. Wah hey, I
>thought, more fun. So, I transferred advent.z5 over, and realised that the
>port doesn't work with status lines. Drat.
>
> This is the plea. Can anyone provide a version of zip which has the
>status line disabled ? Please. I tried remming out all the references to it
>in screen.c, but when I tried to compile it there was a totally different error
>in another module. Being the big girls blouse that I am, I haven't a clue what
>to do with it.

No can do. The Z5 games don't have an actual status line; the games
themselves put stuff on the screen that looks like a status line, which is not
the same thing. Infocom rearranged things this way almost a decade ago so
that games could create more complex status lines customized to the peculiar
requirements of the individual game.

It might be possible in principle to create a specialized ZIP that could
recognize the situation, but it would be fairly unstable, and in some games it
would probably result in killing information you need to play the game.