Thanks for posting the details.
Yes, I remember that aspect of Strange Odyssey – now that you mention it.
I bet that when the ports were originally done, they did have that effect. A Z-code interpreter in 1995 would have been running on a much slower computer! And quite possibly would have had different display optimizations. If the converted code draws the status window, and then immediately erases it and redraws it, that would probably have worked as a “flash” on most interpreters back then. Today, I wouldn’t expect it to work.
(I haven’t looked at the scott2zip source to see if this is what is really happening.)