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

[samwyse]

On 10/20/05, Rikard Peterson <info at trumgottist.com> wrote:
> fredrik at ramsberg.net skrev:
>
> >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.
> >
> >
> I haven't yet played any Swedish IF on it, but I have Frobnitz installed
> on my Palm (a Treo 600) and I loaded up "Den Mörka Manteln" to it to
> check how it handled it. I'm pleased to report that Frobnitz handles
> both input and output without problems. It only messes up in the game
> listing where the game is shown as "Den M~rka Manteln".

The dictionary in .z9 has variable resolution (from game to game, not
within a game), so that you can use resolutions greater than 3 bytes
for languages that use lots of the more "expensive" ZSCII" character
encodings.  This need for greater resolution has been beaten to death
in the past:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/search?q=dictionary+resolution

.z9 would make for better non-English games, increasing the demand for
'terps that support them.  And supporting just .z9 is pretty simple. 
My patch for Frotz is only a couple of dozen lines, and includes a
compile-type switch for fast or slow 'terps.  (Fast 'terps perform
run-time validity checking of the .z9 file, slow 'terps assume that
the file is internally consistent.  This isn't just for debugging; I
presume that the checking will be turned on by default on all modern
desktop-based 'terps as it only costs a few CPU cycles for every
high-memory access.)