We have just published Release 3 of Ozmoo, the free Z-code/Infocom interpreter for the C64. Compared to Release 2, which came out in June 2019, this release has:
Darkmode - a secondary, configurable, colour scheme (Player hits F1 key to toggle).
A configurable splash screen just before the game starts.
Support for four new languages. Apart from English, Ozmoo now supports Italian, Danish, Spanish, French, German and Swedish.
The easiest way to use Ozmoo to build games for playing on a C64 or emulator is by going to Ozmoo Online: http://microheaven.com/ozmooonline/ . This web page has received many enhancements as well.
Steve Flintham has done an amazing job of porting our Z-code interpreter Ozmoo to Acorn computers. Ozmoo for Acorn supports various Acorn computers, a co-processor, sideways RAM, shadow RAM, multiple screen modes… Impressive stuff!
Ozmoo, as you may know, is a Z-code interpreter, originally written for the Commodore 64. In December 2020 we announced support for C128 and Plus/4, and there is also a version for Acorn/BBC.
Big news: You can now build games for the MEGA65! (Porting credits: Paul Gardner-Stephen)
Also: Score/Moves in z3 statusline are now printed separately on 80 column screens (MEGA65 + C128)
Ozmoo Online has been updated with the new version.
Also, I made a collection of the first (z1) version of Zork 1, the first (z2) version of Zork 2, and Henrik Åsman’s replica of the 285 point version of Zork from June 14, 1977, plus the best z3 releases of Zork 1, 2 and 3, for C64, C128, Plus/4 and MEGA65:
Biggest news is a new Scrollback buffer feature, letting the player scroll up through text that has scrolled off the screen. Requires a MEGA65, a C64 with REU or C128 with REU.
Ozmoo used to hope that the REU was big enough to hold the story file. Now it calculates the size and figures out if it can be used to hold the story file, a scrollback buffer or both.
Some commandline arguments have changed a bit. Most notable change is that option -dd to disable darkmode has been replaced by -dm:0
Commandline history is now enabled by default on MEGA65, as is Scrollback buffer.
(See previous posts for links to Ozmoo, Ozmoo Online etc)
Ozmoo has reached v11.25, and now has support for scrollback buffer in RAM on all platforms. If you enable this on a game for C64 or C128, Ozmoo will still use an REU for the buffer is available.
Ozmoo Online has been updated with the new version: Ozmoo Online
Ozmoo 14.7 is out, with important bug fixes and added features for Commander X16:
Custom fonts (nice to have for games in English, crucial for games in many other languages)
User-selectable scroll speed, and tear-free scrolling
Fast restarts (static part of the story file isn’t reloaded)
save/restore had potentially game-crashing bugs, depending on ROM version on Commander X16.
Using the custom font option (available on C64, C128, Plus/4, MEGA65 and Commander X16), one can play games in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Danish (other languages are possible too, but require some work). Screenshot below shows Ă„ventyr, a Swedish translation of Adventure.
Ozmoo 14.29 is out. Some highlights of what happened since 14.7:
User can create a .ozmoorc file to set paths to executables, e.g. X16 = C:\emu\x16emu.exe. .ozmoorc can be located in $OZMOO_HOME, cwd, or $HOME . This should make it a lot easier for users to update Ozmoo.
Scrolling was made 3.5x faster on Commander X16
Ozmoo can now auto-expand “x” to “examine”, controlled with -x, enabled by default in Infocom games that benefit from it
Numerous bug fixes.
In other recent news, Ozmoo Online now supports building disk images for Acorn/BBC computers as well.
It supports UNDO on Commander X16 (already supported on C64, C128 and MEGA65), so you can take back your last move when you mess up! Has optimizations and bugfixes.
Changed make.rb options for choosing colours. New options are e.g. -fgcol:black -bgcol:yellow -bordercol:fg -inputcol:lightgrey -cursorcol:lightblue -dmfgcol:blue -dmbgcol:ltgreen. See the manual for details.
No more colour replacing, as all 16 colours of the c64 palette are now always available. A game can use the extra colours too (colour 8-15 in the C64 palette are colour 16-23 in the Z-code palette).
Specified the cost in bytes for some features in the instructions printed by make.rb when invoked without parameters.
Updated the manual section on dependencies.
Optimizations:
Commented out a few lines of code meant for debug in zmachine.asm
Bugfixes:
Overwriting save files had been broken for many months, but we didn’t know. Fixed it now.
Fixed broken PRNG initialization for X16.
Zeropage location $ab was used to remember if text output is buffered on C64, MEGA65 and Plus/4, but this address was actually unsafe to use on all of these platforms. Changed it to $c8 on C64/MEGA65 and $d0 on Plus/4.
Zeropage location $a7 was used to remember current window on C64/MEGA65 and Plus/4. This was breaking compatibility with fastload module of Action Replay cartridge on C64. Changed to use $d8 on all three platforms.
make.rb will now stop user from accidentally specifying two different story files.
Changed File.exists to File.exist in make.rb, as the latter is correct, and the former isn’t supported in newer Ruby versions.
Removed option -scale 2 for xemu (X16 emulator), as this could wreck havoc on some screens.
