New release of "A Change in the Weather"

[Andrew C. Plotkin]

I've uploaded a new version of weather.z5. There is exactly one change
-- the "Hit any key to continue" routine works correctly. (It worked
before in ZIP-based emulators, but not in Infocom's emulators.)

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.)

--Z

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

[Torbj|rn Andersson]

erky...@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.)

Sounds like I'll have to make some modifications to what little I've
written in Inform myself ... That's what I get for looking at others'
examples instead of reading the specification, I guess. :-)

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.

_
Torbjorn Andersson

[Andrew C. Plotkin]

d91...@Student.DoCS.UU.SE (Torbj|rn Andersson) writes:
> erky...@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.

[Paul David Doherty]

In article <MkegDqe00...@andrew.cmu.edu>,

Andrew C. Plotkin <erky...@CMU.EDU> wrote:
>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.)

The very same thing happens with Infocom's Amiga interpreter. The
IBM one is the only one that doesn't choke on @read_char 1 0 0...

-- Dave