New Console8 VDP 2.7.0 version released

With the additional features and bugfixes in the newest Console8 VDP code (thanks Steve Sims!) it inspired me to take advantage of them, and see how far I could push the code to make the Infocom adventures (and later z-machine games) as enjoyable and full-featured as possible.

This means I needed to rewrite a large amount of the code from the previous version. The big ticket items that have been rewritten:

• The screen model has been re-written to take advantage of the text window functions
• Highlighting has been rewritten to manually create reverse (inverse) text
• Accented and special characters remapped from CodePage 437 (terminal mode) to CodePage 1252 (it's ISO-8859-1 with some extras)
• Keyboard routines remapped to enable arrow keys and the full available set of Function keys recognised by the z-machine (F1-F10)

Here's an example of Beyond Zork (download the Masterpieces version here) with the minimap and the endurance stat showing. To get this graphical map rather than the ASCII map, answer the question "Is this a VT220?" with "yes":

You can also now program all of the function keys to save on typing in Beyond Zork using the "define" command. I recommend reading the manual for other commands to enhance the game experience. Here are the default definitions:

Here's a demonstration of how well the CodePage 1252 supports the extended character set available in the Z-machine:

And last of all, this was the hardest to debug in the new screen model, in all it's glory. I could go into more detail about what was needed here, but that's a longer story for another time: