Zoom 8.0 Build 1015 review
DownloadZoom is a Z-Machine, which means that it plays text adventure games written in ZCode.
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Zoom is a Z-Machine, which means that it plays text adventure games written in ZCode. The original games were written by a company called 'Infocom' in the 80's: these are available on the Infocom Masterpieces CD, published by Activision.
Unfortunately, Activision seems to have lost interest in this title - however, there are a few companies that have a stock of this CD.
In around 1993, a compiler called 'Inform' was released that allowed ordinary mortals to create their own ZCode adventures. This sparked quite a revival, and there are many games available for download here (ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/)
Inform itself has a homepage here (http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform.html)
The Mac OS X version supports all the features of the X-Windows version, has a much better user interface, and supports several extra features, such as speech output.
Here are some key features of "Zoom":
Full support for the Z-Machine as defined by the Z-Machine specification version 1.0/1.1 draft 6
Timed input
Multiple fonts
Font 3
Mouse
Support for version 6, including pictures and the mouse
Text input history
Scrollback
Dynamic window resizing and font changing
Speech output
Quickdraw or Quartz rendering (the Quartz rendering is somewhat experimental, but looks a lot better than Quickdraw...)
The finder can be used to launch both games and saved game files.
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