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

[fredrik@ramsberg.net]

Quoting Johnny Billquist <bqt at Update.UU.SE>:

> On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Rikard Peterson 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".
>
> Well, I can report that my Z-machine implementation for the PDP-11 handles
> this game just fine as well... :-)

That's really good news! I also want to thank Rikard for his
investigation.

If you, or anyone else, would care to spend ten minutes making a more
complete test, please download this file:

http://www.microheaven.com/swedish/Swedish_testfiles.zip

The zip archive includes a small test game in z5 and ulx format
and a transcript. The game first writes out three words, with
the first character capitalised. Then the game starts and you
need to type in (or cut-and-paste) five commands. If the output
is the same as in the transcript, the terp has passed the test.
If it passes the test, the terp can...

* print accented characters contained in strings.

* print accented characters using "print (char)".

* handle a completely new Zscii character table, defined
with Zcharacter (Z-machine only).

* accept accented characters in user input and store
them using the correct charcodes in the buffer.

* properly match words containing accented characters in
player input against dictionary words.

* downcase accented characters in user input (Z-machine only).

I'd be very happy to get reports about how this test went,
with a download link to the specific version of the terp used,
and will publish the results.

/Fredrik