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

[fredrik@ramsberg.net]

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.

> The people who were looking for help with Finnish or
> Swedish games seem to have dropped out of r.a.i-f, but I'd like .z9 to
> be there if they or their countrymen ever return.

The guy working on the Finnish Inform library, Torvinen, struggles
on it seems. He posted to r.a.i-f not so long ago.

I'm pretty much the only one who cares about games in Swedish,
at least in a loud way and on the newsgroup. I haven't been
nagging much on the newsgroups lately, simply because my nagging
doesn't change much in the end. Anyway, the download stats tell
me I'm not the only one playing the games that have been
produced, so I still think it's worthwile to support the
Swedish Inform library. I won't be able to contribute much to
an Inform 6.31 release, but I will update the Swedish library
files to make full use of it, if it does get out.

/Fredrik