Message-ID: <3B5D7BBA.C64B2A50@csi.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 09:44:26 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Z-Machine
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David Given wrote:

> In article <3B58406A.2B499A8A@csi.com>,
>         John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com> writes:
> > Fillmore wrote:
> >> I want to upgrade the Z-Machine. Not a lot, but I have some ideas that would
> >> be easy and (I think) worthwhile.
> >> Can anyone come up with a good reason it shouldn't be upgraded?
> > Other than getting stuck in the infinite loop of Glulx and the v6 Z-Machine of
> > "no games means few interpreters, which means no games," none.  As long as
> > changes are "in the spirit of" (whatever that means) the original concepts, I
> > don't see a problem at all, besides that.
> I agree with this. I, for one, would like to do a graphical game; I looked
> into using the Z-machine, but discovered that there are no graphical
> terps. So no game. We need graphical terps!

WinFrotz (and most of the Frotz line, as I recall) does actually do a serviceable
job on the Infocom graphicals.  I was actually going to try it, at one point, but
got sidetracked before I could deceipher the "pix2gif" code to figure out the
graphical format.


> Surely it ought to be
> relatively easy to adapt nitfol to use glk's graphical capabilities to do
> this?

Presumably, yes.


> >> And more importantly, is
> >> anyone willing to discuss the matter?
> > I'm there.  I've been looking for a reasonable excuse to start digging through
> > the Z-Machine innards.
> Well, I *have* been digging through the Z-machine innards. Things I'd
> like:
> * An XOR opcode.

While often convenient, are there many cases in Z-type applications where XOR would
be necessary, rather than comparisons, other logic operations, subtraction, or the
various other common replacements?


> * The ability to put the code multiplier value in the header, so you don't
> need to release a new version of the Z-machine every time you hit the code
> memory limit.

I still say paging would be much more fun...and it would solve the 64K issue, as
well.


> * Better file handling. Currently you can load and save aux files --- but
> you can't load and save *part* of a file. The Z-machine was obviously
> written with stream-based I/O in mind; perhaps this could be finished so
> we can have proper file I/O?

My personal understanding of this, at this point, is that the Z-Machine does it
right, but interpreters don't handle the opcodes correctly.  I may be absolutely
wrong on both points, however.


