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Starting to get a lot happier about the HTML 5 progress being made. Most ZZT and Super ZZT games now load correctly, title screen and gameplay seem to work marginally well, scrolling and dissolve transitions work well (albeit rather slow), GUIs and scroll interfaces seem to work well (once again, a ...

Finally, managed to get a whole-engine HTML 5 integration test working! The main menu shows up, mouse and keyboard are responsive, and the timer iterates at exactly the rate it needs to. Sound effects are not working yet, of course--that will take some doing. And problems keep showing up in the most...

Thanks to Jur for kicking me awake again on this project. It sure isn't easy testing everything. Basically, every single function I created before needs to be re-validated as its JavaScript variant. This picture shows a test application I've made to try out all the different loading and file parsing...

I'd known the Flash browser plug-in was eventually going to vanish. But it's taken a long time. I actually predicted on my website one of the conditions that would herald this moment: near-universal ad-blocking software. Flash might be okay, but the ad abusers are definitely not okay. Practically ev...

Discovered the key mapping in the README. I never would have thought to press X to select a menu item. No SPACE or ENTER for this, which is kind of puzzling. Actually, most of the key bindings (not configurable?) are non-intuitive. WASD is fine, but K and L for turning? Huh? Q and E, or cursor direc...

The game does not work. Menu items are selectable using WASD, but there is no way to choose them (no other keys work), the mouse does not work, and there is no way to quit. Closing the window does not close the command window used to initialize the game.

Have you looked at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Uint8Array? Oh yeah. The problem was that Uint8Array was not resizable or easily iterable; DataView and ArrayBuffer didn't serve quite as seamless a purpose as I wanted. What my own "JS" ve...

One major snag I've overcome in the HTML 5 port of ZZT Ultra: Complete port of the AS3 ByteArray class to JavaScript. I had been under a naive assumption that it wouldn't be that hard to completely re-implement the numerous binary parsing routines in the loader and saver code. Not a good assumption-...

There is indeed a mean trick to that puzzle, even if it is the only puzzle in the whole game. The remaining boards look like they were going to be part of a more involved set of "tricky" puzzle designs, but the corridor is just mundane beyond the first board. But hey, even a one-off puzzle...

I imagine the term "roton" somewhat refers to the behavior, which has a configurable rate to "rotate" the direction. That's just guesswork, though. The Super ZZT lore never explains it. No idea what a "pairer" might have done had it been threshed out. But... I have been...

While on a trip to Italy recently, I passed some time on the train rides writing more scripts for the character interaction. The City of ZZT will be a part of this game, with several characters returning. After writing some dialogue, it gives me some idea of how the GUIs used for character faces sho...

Well, if people still care, it's a good motivation to keep the project current. That's an impossible-to-answer question, which is, what SHOULD the ZZT experience be. In the early 1990s, you couldn't get away with #CHANGE or even that many #PUT commands every frame, since CPUs were really slow. Then,...

I might have only a few more days to live...or maybe hours...I'll make it quick. Curiosity got the better of me. I absolutely had to check Epic's headquarters to see if Sweenoid Man was real. But just as I had dismissed him as fake... this happened. epic_hq_sweenoid_man.jpg He's real! And dangerous!...

Some more info about the sound output by the Hall of Music. The drum samples are just one-offs with no modification, but the source note samples were carefully measured to represent anywhere between 1 and 8 wave cycles, depending on pitch. But they aren't just repeated verbatim. My sound system wrap...

1. If data for the original material is available somewhere. 2. If there is any enduring copyright. Chris here, designer of ZZT Ultra and The Hall of Music . I'm pretty sure you won't need to worry about #2. I recorded DosBox samples for the drum sounds and key frequencies. No one owns the PC speak...