Denial

orion70 wrote:

No computer should be without one!

Quite fitting, isn't it? I noticed it couple of days ago too

Meanwhile back in the laboratory: mad Dr. TNT experiments faster than his poor assistant ral-clan can clean the waste away. Now the creature comes with colors and cursor, while expanding the virtual memory by one page compared to previous version.

ral-clan reported that he can fit 23x27 screen on his NTSC monitor



Trivia: cursor trashes one byte beyond visible screen. Instead of fixing it which would have required either extra code or scrolling screen before absolutely necessary, I worked around the problem by rearranging memory so that I could put an unused byte there. Cost of the fix: one byte, but I got one full page back as rearrangement allowed moving code start downwards in memory.

The last C64 Infocom parser versions had beep sound and key click. Should I add themto the VIC-20 version? Config screen would allow turning sound on/off.

TNT wrote:Should I add them to the VIC-20 version? Config screen would allow turning sound on/off.

IMO, yes, definitely. They're so... eighties .

Great work. IF is being written for z-code to this day, but I don't know if z3 is the usual format now.

TNT wrote:The last C64 Infocom parser versions had beep sound and key click. Should I add themto the VIC-20 version? Config screen would allow turning sound on/off.

Oh yeah!

This is so completely insane. I wouldn't have ever thought that it was possible to port that thing over to a Vic.

DanSolo wrote:Great work. IF is being written for z-code to this day, but I don't know if z3 is the usual format now.

Most of adventures compiled with Inform are V5, larger ones are V8. I plan supporting them in the future. Source code has plenty of conditional code for different Z-machine versions already, for example all object/property/dictionary code and packed addresses handle V3-V8. All new V4 commands are there too, but I postponed debugging them to get V3 parser running on VIC-20. Blame (or thank) carlsson for that.

Games compiled with Inform are slower than those compiled with Infocom's Zilch, I hope my speedups will help there.

VIC people might even write their own adventure games, sticking to V3 for now. I believe that format is plentiful enough.

Once this interpreter is debugged and becomes publically available, perhaps we should arrange a small compo? I don't have a clue what tools one would use to write an adventure game though, but it would get resolved.

Excellent idea Carlsson. One could also learn the mechanics in adventure creation, and port C64 adventures to the VIC-20 (I'm thinking about italian text adventures sold in the newsstands in 1980s).

Were those anything worth porting though? Text adventures using a custom (self-made) parser could differ a lot from game to game how they are built. I once made a few small adventures for fun, based on a design found in a listing then quite expanding on it as required.

I think what made the Infocom adventures so famous was not only the sheer size of the games, but the rich descriptions, advanced vocabulary and dictionary. I imagine you can "hit bear with pole" and "hide behind the biggest tree". A simple two-word parser would need to "wield pole", "hit bear", "go tree", "hide".

Personally I'm all up for Ghislain's post in the other thread about a non-violent game. I think his ideas to collect flowers for the princess and pat the dragon with the fur are excellent. Ideally there are several princesses who like different kinds of flowers, and one which suffers from allergic reactions for whom you need to collect a boquet of non-toxic, plastic flowers. I admit I don't know all Infocom and other Z-code games, but it would have opportunities to become one of the least conventional text adventures ever made.

> MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
You make love.
>

carlsson wrote:his ideas to collect flowers for the princess

Do you think you can just buy her affection like that? What is she, a total ho?

carlsson wrote:and pat the dragon with the fur

What poor animal had to suffer a cruel death to provide that fur? You butcher!

DanSolo wrote:What poor animal had to suffer a cruel death to provide that fur? You butcher!

That reminds me of this one in an (admittedly fake) casting show:

Girl: [Is given a small crocodile into her hands]
Reporter: So, what does this crocodile feel like?
Girl: Oh, uh, like a woman's handbag ...
Reporter (turns to audience): Imagine! For this crocodile, 20 handbags had to suffer a cruel death!

carlsson wrote:Once this interpreter is debugged and becomes publically available, perhaps we should arrange a small compo?

There was a "C32” Z-Code Competition for hypothetical Commodore 32 in 2004. Three of games are in V3 format, other three are V5. Games are small enough to fit into memory, so there isn't any disk access after initial load. Restart may require reloading the dynamic part tho.

Inform 7 is the standard tool for creating adventures these days but Z5 is the oldest format it can output (according to the settings tab), so it would be nice if the VIC could interpret that.

If you haven't looked at Inform 7, you're in for a surprise... it's a sophisticated program!
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

Small setback. I tried Seastalker yesterday and couldn't get past "Is this correct" after entering my name as it wouldn't accept neither "y", "yes", "n" nor "no" as valid answer. I will disassemble the datafile and see if I can find what it checks for. I suspect parser returns an extra linefeed or something like that.

Seastalker is an interesting game to test with as it's the only V3 game using split screen (for sonar).