Re: New release of "A Change in the Weather"


Wed, 15 Nov 1995 23:54:14 -0500

d91tan@Student.DoCS.UU.SE (Torbj|rn Andersson) writes:
> erkyrath+@CMU.EDU (Andrew C. Plotkin) wrote:
>
> > If you never had a problem with it, you don't really need to get the
> > new version. On the other hand, future versions of ZIP may not support
> > the undocumented behavior I was relying on. (I was calling @read_char
> > with a timeout of 0, instead of leaving out the timeout entirely.)
>
> Woah, so _that's_ why I was never able to use one of Infocom's own
> version 5 Macintosh interpreters to run curses.z5? (Well, one of them,
> at least -- I may have goofed up on my own, after all.)

Probably. When I ran Weather under Infocom's Mac V5 interpreter (the
one from Border Zone off LTOI, to be precise), it zipped through the
@read_char 1 0 0 choice;
without pausing. But another test program that I ran actually crashed
the interpreter. (I haven't verified that it was that line that did
it, though.)

> If this behaviour of @read_char is removed, I guess all Inform games
> using menus will have to be recompiled, as the DoMenu() function in
> Parser.h uses `@read_char 1 0 0 pkey;' on two occasions.

I noticed that, and I agree, unless there's some consideration I don't
understand. Which is likely.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."