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From: mycroft@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: alt.sources,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Zterp 0.3 alpha, part 0 of 2
Message-ID: <1mb76cINNj4l@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 22 Feb 93 18:48:43 GMT
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[I actually stopped working on this some time ago, but never released
it.  I have not implemented SAVE, RESTORE, and RESTART, or the `script'
feature, nor have I actually played through a version 5 game to be sure
it works perfectly.  While I will implement those functions at some
point, I don't want to work on it right now, and the code might be
useful to some people as is.

The point of this interpreter is to be small, fast, and conceptually
simple.  The entire source, uncompressed, is about 50K.

I have personally compiled Zterp under AIX 3.2, 386BSD, SunOS 4.1.2,
and HPUX 7.0 and 8.0, using GCC 2.3.3.  On SunOS I needed only to
remove references to stdlib.h; the others compiled as is.]


Announcing Zterp, yet another Infocom game interpreter
------------------------------------------------------

Zterp runs ZIL version 3-5 games.  This includes all Standard, Plus,
and Advanced series games, but not version 6, Graphics.  It will run
versions 1 and 2 whenever I find an old Apple II game to test it with.


Why another interpreter?
------------------------

I started working on Zterp just before the version 4 of the Info Task
Force interpreter was released.  I continued it for mainly the
following reasons:

* The ITF code is poorly abstracted and overly complicated, at best.
It also does not have UNDO.

* Zmachine only runs version 3 games, and isn't really any better than
the ITF interpreter anyway.

* Both ITF and Zmachine use the Z virtual memory system, which is not
necessary and slows them down.  My interpreter does not implement
virtual memory--though I may use mmap() in a future release to take
advantage of Unix's (albeit poor) virtual memory capability.  Modern
workstations have plenty of memory to run the games without the klugy
VM system anyway.


Where to get it?
----------------

I have just posted it to alt.sources.
-- 
 \  /   Charles Hannum, mycroft@ai.mit.edu
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