asiekierka

To be exact, what you're editing is an array of ten 20-byte Pascal strings (so length-prefixed) which contain the world's flags. A ZZT Object can set or clear flags which are carried across boards; this mechanism was repurposed to add the "SECRET" flag, which blocks editing with the built-in ZZT Editor.

Unless... you use the "?" key to open the cheat console, and type in "+DEBUG" as a command (in ZZT 3.1+, IIRC) - then it will let you open the worlds and edit them as-is.

The amount of worthwhile short games and art created with ZZT in the past has always made me feel rather astonished. That people are still making new, high-quality productions in it in the present - even moreso.

By the way - If you're a ZZT (or MegaZeux!) user from the 90s/early 00s and still have archives from that period of any kind - that is world collections, etc. - we'd love to hear more! A common misconception is that we have preserved almost all ZZT worlds ever released to the public. Unfortunately, that's not true; while it's getting better thanks to modern efforts (with hundreds of previously unknown worlds archived in the past two-three years), archives especially from the BBS and AOL-centric eras (1991-1998) remain particularly spotty.

ZZT Ultra is an older project to try and re-implement ZZT in ActionScript 3; it did receive an HTML5 port attempt a few years later, though.

The best way to play ZZT on the web currently is to use the dedicated Zeta emulator; it's integrated with the Museum of ZZT, as well as used by most ZZT-based games published on Itch.

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!

I'd like to ask a fairly specific question as a ZZT archivist/researcher; it's okay if you don't remember the answer.

Based on interviews with Tim Sweeney, it is said that he would let other people playtest pre-release versions of ZZT. What wasn't clear from the context is if anyone else ever had their own copy of these pre-release versions, which have been for a long time - due to some features and traits present in some of the pack-in worlds which were not possible to achieve with the editor as released - a source of speculation in the community. Do you happen to have any recollection of that?

>People would ship games they called toolboxes.

The term was "toolkits". While most probably followed the convention due to Alexis Janson's 1994 Super Tool Kit, or STK - which utilized hex editing to unlock far more color variants than the engine itself offered - there were actually earlier, based on using in-world interactions to get a more limited set of color variants - such as "Tim's Toolkit" from 1992.

Libreboot does not support modern Intel hardware, as it refuses to include proprietary binary blobs. Coreboot is another story entirely.

Remember that this would probably be much more difficult for modern compilers with their large stacks of optimizations!

There's an entire genre at the Museum of ZZT dedicated specifically to in-game "magazines" covering community-created games and previews -> https://museumofzzt.com/search?genre=Magazine

To correct that a little:

- I'd love to give a more detailed explanation, but I've never managed to consistently operate a blog, so that might need to wait a while. - After getting some perspective, I may have overexaggerated the scale of the number of hours I had spent on this.

They indeed were; ZZT is far from the first game creation tool.

However, most of those were either commercial products or restricted the editing capabilities in some manner to free users. ZZT was shareware, but the registered version differed solely in the amount of official game worlds available (and the lack of a registration message on exit). The editor was fully-featured and no restrictions were put on usage. This is what I think makes it stand out from other game creation tools of the era and what made it a popular tool on BBSes.

>I remember the shareware versions that I downloaded from my friendly neighborhood BBS offered the source code for a fee; a large fee, if memory serves.

None of the BBS releases for ZZT we found have such a statement; though I do think there exist some pieces of software which did.

Incorrect. Japanese Blu-Ray releases do have HDR, but not 4K; and the former is only available in Panasonic's proprietary format, which is exclusive to their very-high-end players.

PSA: These are bootleg movie collections, not authorized or licensed from the Studio itself. The only official collection in the Western market, IIRC, is the Disney-released Hayao Miyazaki collection.

Did they make the decision, or did Snopes ask them to blacklist their website?

Yes, as far as I know both the Tegra 3 and K1 are vulnerable.

The exploit concerns most Tegra chips currently on the market, not just the Nintendo Switch. Those are used in, for example, cars. I believe that was part of the reason.

Not to mention, it's not patchable without a hardware revision, so sharing it privately before sharing it publicly, while strongly hinting at that it's not patchable without a hardware revision (which has been done) has the same effect in practice for those wanting to escape Nintendo's jail, while letting those who use the Tegra in security-sensitive environments prepare adequately.

You can, nowadays, use a BIOS patch and an X220 palmrest to put the X220 keyboard into an X230.

The Nintendo Switch runs a modified version of the 3DS OS, not FreeBSD. It does use the (Free?)BSD network stack, however.

My apologies. Way too often I hear people in the Minecraft community say everything would be magically fixed if the game had simply used C++ in place of Java. I guess I'm too quick to jump on people using "C++", "high performance" and "Minecraft-like thing" in one comment nowadays.

>very high-performance C++

C++ does not automatically mean "very high-performance". A lot of users get worse framerates than with Minecraft (not everyone, though!), and the entity/"mob" code used to be insanely slow, at least a year ago.

One of the bigger arguments is also "it only works on Linux, what about BSDs, OS X, etc.?"

IC2 never stopped development, it just became... different.

Actually, most mods are not closed source anymore and most modders moved to CurseForge over adf.ly (which is not perfect, I admit, but much better). This is not 2012.

The Minetest API is itself a bit more primitive, as it's server-side-only Lua scripting as opposed to essentially hacking the whole game engine inside out with zero security involved.

As for modpacks, they add a lot of RAM usage especially to the whole thing. Minecraft 1.9 also made it possible (theoretically, that is it's possible in the code and probably used by Realms) to run multiple servers in the same Minecraft server instance, saving a lot of overhead on the block definitions, classes, JVMs, etc.

Oh, I see - MySQL is taking so long to process the queries that php-fpm runs out of free processes. Trying to "fix" it...

Update: I commented out most of the main page, but now at least the rest works. Yay. Needs caching. I'll add some when I come back home in four hours, nonetheless - this brave attempt at trying to resurrect the site's community made the whole thing collapse unexpectedly.

Hello! I am actually the maintainer of the site, and an active user back in its heyday. It is largely kept in maintenance mode, as the codebase is reminiscent of the year 2006 (as was passed on to me from the creators - if not for a rewrite to use JSON for ASCIImations, it would probably still run fine on IE6...) and I do not have enough time to give it a proper cleanup.

The site is back up, and I'll try to ensure that for the near future - the VPS it's on is fairly low-end.

Note: I am aware that the main page is by far the slowest part of the website.

It sounds blissful, yes, but then there are many serious problems with that when applied to the concept of someone growing up: All their friends are most likely using websites running propietary client-side code to communicate, enjoying their time playing propietary games on propietary operating systems. This approach reminds me of how very conservative parents bar their children from anything which might corrupt them due to not being right with their beliefs - the problem with that, however, is by barring them from potentially going in that direction, you also bar them from ever figuring out on their own what's wrong with the things they say are wrong. In other words, they're, in my view, more likely to not understand the issue with propietary software if they never experience it first-hand.

Orthodoxy is one way to live life, but for a growing organism it might be more harmful than anything. I mean, at a young age, are they going to understand that they can't play with their friends because the software they're using is not available under a freedom-ensuring license? Or that they can't talk to them on propietary websites? Or are they, instead, going to rebel - and potentially develop a lifetime grudge against the whole idea of free software?

I think plugins like NoCheatPlus did something about it, but with more and more conservative cheat detection methods you start running into the edge cases of legitimate users.

Bukkit? This does not sound very client side. Even if it runs on LAN, you're still only touching the integrated server. Client-side scripting in Minecraft-esque modding would probably mean things like being able to create proper, interactive GUIs, HUDs, dynamic rendering, etc.