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So. I'm on Windows 2000 and DOS programs generally work all right with minimal tweaking, including ZZT. 95% of the functions in ZZT work just fine, except for a couple of things that I have to do workarounds for (e.g. music pacing and weird fonts).

I have tried running ZZT in Dosbox and it seems to work quite well, except for being a little unresponsive and having very poor sound pacing. I've tried elementary tweaking based on what I can understand from the help for the program, and can improve a few things, but it gave me an idea for a thread.

For those of you who successfully run ZZT or DOS KevEdit in Dosbox, do you have suggested tweaks in order to get it working perfectly?

Exophase had some program that fixed the lag in dosbox but nobody remembers what it's called and Exophase went into an emophase and ran away.

I was fooling around with QEMU today, trying to get ZZT to run on an Intel Mac. The version that I installed apparently had some optimizations for Intel processors - it ran too fast! There was no PC speaker either, so iI didn't really like it.

I've been thinking for a while now that it would be cool to write my own Dos emulator, but tweak it specifically for ZZT. You would run a Windows/Mac/Linux executable and ZZT would appear either in a window or fullscreen. It would look like a port of ZZT, but in theory it would be a completely accurate simulation of all of ZZT's bugs - it would in fact be ZZT. ZZT.EXE and ZZT.DAT would be a couple of resource files used by the program, never really seen by the casual user. Unfortunately, I don't have an excellent understanding of super-low-level computing, so that idea is filed under "dreams" at the moment, not "plans". Still...

Quantum P. wrote:I was fooling around with QEMU today, trying to get ZZT to run on an Intel Mac. The version that I installed apparently had some optimizations for Intel processors - it ran too fast! There was no PC speaker either, so iI didn't really like it.

I've been thinking for a while now that it would be cool to write my own Dos emulator, but tweak it specifically for ZZT. You would run a Windows/Mac/Linux executable and ZZT would appear either in a window or fullscreen. It would look like a port of ZZT, but in theory it would be a completely accurate simulation of all of ZZT's bugs - it would in fact be ZZT. ZZT.EXE and ZZT.DAT would be a couple of resource files used by the program, never really seen by the casual user. Unfortunately, I don't have an excellent understanding of super-low-level computing, so that idea is filed under "dreams" at the moment, not "plans". Still...

So you would like, roll your own DoxBox? How would you optimize it for ZZT?

probably by cutting out things like soundblaster support, and other drivers. It's mainly made for graphical games right? It may not put too much processing might into the text displays.

I run ZZT on a laptop, because it automatically outputs PC speaker sounds to the regular speakers. :P

I can run ZZT moderately well without tweaking anything on Windows XP. I hate Dosbox because it stalls horribly and just doesn't do the job right. It's the only way I can get sound from ZZT though (no PC speaker); I don't care about sound anyway.

Sometimes ZZT and KevEdit suddenly go all white. The whole screen turns solid white, but the applications themselves are still running. When I go out of fullscreen and back into fullscreen again, everything goes black and grey. This happens out of nowhere, and it's really annoying.

DOS colors are very dark for me too. Most of the time I can't even tell red from brown or grey from black. I use UPAL to edit the color palettes and load KevEdit with a batch file. To play games I just use KevEdit as a frontend and use the test play feature to actually play a game.

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why the fuck dont i just use windows kevedit and zzt under windows

zzt under windows is just a icon set and a file association.

But a useful one