The Reconstruction of ZZT is a reverse-engineered recreation of the source code to the last official release of ZZT, ZZT 3.2. The output executable is byte-for-byte identical with said release, which means that the source code accurately represents the original engine's behavior.
The intent behind this project is to facilitate improved preservation and accessibility of ZZT's worlds and community, as well as facilitate new, exciting developments.
Here I'll try to make the Reconstruction compile with Free Pascal in general, and then on Linux in particular. As a consequence, I'll likely disable some features, at least to begin with, so that ZZT can work in a terminal.
In particular, I'm likely going to disable sound because direct PC speaker access is hard, and mouse and joystick support for similar reasons.
- No joystick or mouse support.
- No sound or music.
- Cursor is always shown, even when it's not desired.
- Unicode characters are garbled at the right edge of the screen due to Crt having been coaxed into something it really doesn't support.
- Duplicating something with stats onto the player causes a range check error. (game.pas:386, only intermittently)
- Crt really isn't made for Unicode output and so has strange corner cases (see above)
- Even with the stdin-flushing fix, moving the player about by holding down a key is kinda janky. It probably can't be improved without going fully to ncurses or SDL.
- Possible performance regressions involving SOUNDS timer.
Bugfixes marked with IMP are portable, i.e. not specific to the Linux port, and should probably be included in later versions of ZZT for DOS as well.