Basic Screen Effects not working?

[ksignorini]

I don’t get it. I’ve look at many examples of how to use Emily Short’s Basic Screen Effects and I can’t even get it to work at a basic level. Here’s what I’ve got in my story code:

"Testing" by "Me"
Include Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.
When play begins:
	turn the background black;
	say white letters.

This Room is a room.  "Here is the first room."

I instantly get an error on compile:

Problem. You wrote ‘turn the background black’ : but this is a phrase which I don’t recognise, possibly because it is one you meant to define but never got round to, or because the wording is wrong (see the Phrasebook section of the Index to check). Alternatively, it may be that the text immediately previous to this was a definition whose ending, normally a full stop, is missing?

Problem. In the line ‘say white letters’ , I was expecting that ‘white letters’ would be something to ‘say’, but it didn’t look like any form of ‘say’ that I know. So I tried to read ‘white letters’ as a value of some kind (because it’s legal to say values), but couldn’t make sense of it that way either.

Sometimes this happens because punctuation has gone wrong - for instance, if you’ve omitted a semicolon or full stop at the end of the ‘say’ phrase…

What on earth am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.
Kent

[ksignorini]

…and yet, using the command:

clear the screen

works perfectly. As does this code copied directly from the documentation:

When play begins: display the boxed quotation "What's this room? I've forgotten my compass. Well, this'll be south-south-west parlour by living room. -- Philadelphia Story"; show the current quotation; pause the game.

Now I’m really confused.

[Dannii]

Those phrases are only available for the Z-Machine, but Inform now compiles to Glulx by default.

[ksignorini]

Ahhhh. Thanks!