[z-machine] [Inform mntce] The Z-machine and Informs 6 and 7

[samwyse]

On 10/20/05, fredrik at ramsberg.net <fredrik at ramsberg.net> wrote:
> Quoting samwyse <samwyse at gmail.com>:
>
> > A secondary design goal of .z9 was to keep its distance from Glulx.
> > For example, there are lots of PalmOS-based interpreters for the
> > zmachine, but few or none for Glulx (or TADS for that matter).  With a
> > small patch-size, I hope that .z9 would show up on such small devices
> > quickly.  What I don't see is a need to distort the zmachine
> > architecture to do things that other VMs already do better.
>
> Unfortunately, there isn't much interest in supporting accented
> characters in terps, especially in user input. I haven't had the
> chance to examine any of the Palm terps with regard to this, but
> I would be surprised if any of them had acceptable support for
> accented characters. And I'm just talking about Latin-1
> characters here. I expect the situation is a lot worse for
> Cyrillic, Greek etc.
>
> Non-English games may become the primary reason for using
> V9, but the lack of support for non-English characters
> may actually eliminate that use.

I will defer to those with experience in the matter.  However, most of
the discussions that I've seen take the stance that the input of
accented characters is unneeded, because users don't want to take the
time to use proper accenting.  OTOH, this may be a chicken-and-egg
problem, since a decent input method may encourage greater usage.

I don't expect any Palm to support full Unicode, but there are ways to
support all of the "common" character sets (Cyrillic, Greek, Latin-1,
Latin-5).  I would hope that ways could be found so that a Cyrillic
game would be usable on a Russian-nationalized Palm, a Greek game on a
Greek Palm, etc.

My copy of Windows Frotz does support full Unicode, and I've used it
to test a WIP that includes several Russian speaking NPCs.  It's a bit
of work, but their speech displays in Cyrillic on 'terps that support
it, and phoenetisized Latin on those that don't.