Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

Despite ZZT being 30 years old, the Museum of ZZT (mentioned briefly at the end of the article) has attracted a small but vibrant community. Zeta sets ZZT free from DOS and DOSBox, and because Zeta can be even compiled to JS, games can be published to places like Itch.

Example: The King In Yellow Borders, a horror game: https://stale-meme-emporium.itch.io/the-king-in-yellow-borde...

The other massive shot-in-the-arm for ZZT was asiekierka's disassembly and reconstruction of the original Pascal source code: https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt (Tim Sweeney allowed the reconstruction to be released under the MIT licence.)

As an accidental 30th birthday celebration, the community remixed the first world - Town of ZZT - and Dr. Dos livestreamed the first half of it just the other day: https://museumofzzt.com/file/t/TOWNRMIX.zip

Also, Dr. Dos was recently interviewed on "Preserving Worlds", discussing ZZT, the Museum, and Zeta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhCYQI_XBl0

Since I imagine there are many HN readers that might not get it: "The King in Yellow Borders" is a ZZT inside joke. When editing a ZZT world, new boards by default are created with a yellow border of what (if memory serves me) in Unicode would be U+2593 "dark shade" blocks. A game containing boards that maintain these borders in an unironic way would generally be perceived as... well, I'd say "amateurish" but ZZT creators were generally all amateurs, so let's go with "unrefined".

(It's also a pun on The King in Yellow but that reference is explained in the itch.io page.)

In those days we called them char 178 (from Code Page 437, and possibly others).

I didn't want to show my age (any more than I already did by knowing about ZZT). Also due to said age I couldn't remember the character number in CP437... though I did remember that the shaded blocks were mysteriously separate from the solid one at 219.

Minor correction regarding Zeta: It's still technically an emulator of a DOS environment - just an incredibly bare-bones one, with enough implemented to run ZZT/Super ZZT and little more. However, being made to run a specific executable lets it do some other tricks - such as reduce input lag or introduce an "idlehack" to prevent 100% CPU usage. Zeta was designed over a year before the Reconstruction of ZZT was even a seriously entertained idea, and I'd have certainly gone about it differently had I had hindsight.

Also, Zeta is a JavaScript/WebAssembly project in this regard (the C part of the codebase is compiled to WASM, but can also produce an SDL-based desktop variant) and developed as such; not just JS!

You're absolutely correct, of course. I was more saying that Zeta allows you to get ZZT without having to own a DOS machine or be good at configuring DOSBox.

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