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From: sandmann@netcom.com (Dave Sanderman)
Subject: Re: [Z-machine] Question of opinion
Message-ID: <sandmannE2tLJ0.6GH@netcom.com>
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References: <E2I63q.436@news.kesmai.com> <erkyrathE2Ip5L.Dqz@netcom.com> <32bb7c70.312734@news.cstone.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 14:57:00 GMT
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rich@cstone.net (Rich) writes:

>On Mon, 16 Dec 1996 17:41:45 GMT, erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
>wrote:

>>Those are really not much problem. Seastalker is just a very large status
>>line; it's not harder than box quotes (and trust me, you can't get away
>>without box quotes.) Bureaucracy is text input in the status line. 
>>It's a series of read_char opcodes, so all you really have to do is 
>>handle those normally. Making an input mark appear in the status line is 
>>nice but not necessary. 

>Yep, knew that. But Windoze still makes this unreasonably complex. I
>have new hopes for CRichEditView after I got it sit, roll over, and
>other tricks. That's the only multi-color scrolling display option you
>have under Win32 short of writing one ground up. It was quite fun
>defeating all of the things it would let you do that you shouldn't be
>able to, like clear text out of areas other than your input line :-).

well, there is another option for multi-color scrolling display--a console
window.  granted, this doesn't work especially well for supporting v6 graphics,
but it works very nicely under NT, where i regularly run 120x80 consoles.
the console manipulation routines in win32 are pretty simple to use; the only
complicated part would be faking out a scrollback system.  if you're
interested in looking at some code, send me a piece of email and i'll zip
up my barely-in-progress console-mode z-machine emulator.  don't expect much,
although i did successfully play the zork trilogy through on it.
  dave sanderman -- davidsan@microsoft.com
  i speak for myself, not for microsoft
