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OTHERS.DOC
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1994-06-24
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The other main Infocom interpreters on the Archimedes are Frank Lancaster's
Zip program and Edouard Poor's desktop interpreters (called !AUInfocom and
!Zip.) Zip is blindingly fast, and very compact, but runs outside the desktop
using the standard system font and plays only version 3 games. The font size
this implies is enough to make it almost unusable on an A4. Edouard Poor's
interpreters (at least early versions) run in the desktop, but fail to
display a cursor and fail to handle backspacing properly. Frank Lancaster
has also released ZipDebug, which is a combined debugger and interpreter; the
main point of interest is prototype support for version 6 games.
The only other Infocom interpreter I have seen on the Series3 is InfoPlay
ported by Oliver Wagner, and based on Mark Howell's ZIP interpreter rather
than the ITF interpreter. Currently, InfoPlay suffers 3 main disadvantages;
it uses more memory (typically 6 to 10K, depending on the font loaded by
Infocom), it uses simple fixed-width fonts for output, and the OS integration
is slightly buggy; try ESCaping from a save dialogue, or killing the task
from the System screen.
(InfoPlay used more memory than the 1.4x version of Infocom; I suspect the
features that have crept in since then mean that memory usage is now
approximately level, however Infocom has many more bells and whistles :-)
The main infocom interpreters in use under UNIX appear to be simple ports
of the ITF and ZIP interpreters, usually running under the curses screen
handling library. I am not aware of any other interpreters running under
X11.