DreamZZT: An open-source ZZT engine for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Nintendo DS and the SEGA Dreamcast.

jakellyHAH's picture

The ZZT Blitzkrieg-a-thon! is coming up soon so I wiki'ed ZZT to find out more and found DreamZZT, which is a rebuild of the ZZT engine so it can work on modern systems, so you dont have to mess around with DOS emulators. I haven tried it yet but it seems pretty solid....

official download links on github:

https://github.com/c99koder/DreamZZT/downloads

EDIT:
oops, I gave the wrong download link that was only for the mac build, all fixed now.

I have to interject: There

I have to interject: There are no good ZZT emulations.

DreamZZT, if you can get past the crashing, is probably the most complete I've seen so far. Having said that, I think this has a long, long way to go...

- The push behaviour is just broken. In ZZT, pushing is done by a recursive function. The reason why ZZT crashes when you duplicate a player clone onto a pushable is because either the player clone is recursively pushing the pushable into itself, or its pushing the player clone into itself.
- PAGE DOWN DOESN'T DO A DAMN THING IN SCROLLBOXES. GRR!
- Speaking of scrollboxes, it sometimes pops up with a scrollbox instead of putting a message at the bottom.
- Speaking of the message down the bottom, the colour cycle is different.
- The ZZT-OOP parser may not be sufficiently crap enough to be accurate.
- Anything to do with player clones is almost guaranteed to break.
- Statted empties do not affect the player, which probably indicates that there is something fundamentally wrong.

Seriously, get a copy of ZZT Encyclopaedia (available on zzt.org , 3C is canonical and in fewer files but Online would work fine too) and watch just about every ZZT clone die. My personal favourites would have to be NO LIMITS ][ in 2ENCY3C.

Danni's picture

Yeah, this is why I was

Yeah, this is why I was hesitant to go with a ZZT engine recreation.

As one of the co-creators of ZZT Encyclopedia...

...you have no idea how much it warms my heart to see someone mention it a decade-plus later. :) Man, the feels.

dreamzzt works well for some games

I tried it on the ds and was impressed by it. Mainly when you click the edge of the board it actually scrolls. If you want good ZZT interpretation Plastic GCS was the new wave. It was slightly misunderstood and 0.5 I don't think was released, but 0.4 had multiplayer albeit slow on the net. I might have a copy of 0.35 lying around. Have no docs, but it does run ZZT files.

commodore's picture

Lyon is coming along nicely,

Lyon is coming along nicely, albiet it is only for Windows and requires VB dlls. It really is a frontend for Roton, which is a library file that is based on the disassembled ML. So in theory it could be ported with a different frontend.

http://zzt.org/fora/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3320

pensive-mosquitoes