So about a year ago I started a You Tube channel to try and document my projects and showcase what I’m currently working on. From a literally shaky start – lots of wonky hand held mobile phone footage – over time I’ve embraced higher video production values which makes full use of Kdenlive and the Spectrum ROM font.
Over the Christmas holidays, I ported John Elliott’s ZXZVM – a Z machine interpreter for the ZX Spectrum which lets you play Infocom text adventures and newer interactive fiction titles – to esxDOS. You can find out more in the video below.
This is absolutely amazing and actually a big thing for the Spectrum community. I’ll make sure I’ll ping my contacts at Crash and I will definitely make the players of Hibernated 1 Director’s Cut aware of this. Up to this day the enhanced version of my IF title was only available for the Spectrum +3 (we are NOT using ZXZVM though) but I really felt sorry for the Spectrum community because of the limited circle of Spectrum users able to play it. Now everyone with a 128k Spectrum and DivMMC is able to enjoy my efforts. Thank you so much!
Hi Stefan. No problem and thanks for the kind words. Glad you found a use for it. As a former +2 owner, it didn’t seem fair that only +3 owners were able to play Z-Machine games. 🙂
Nice work, Bob. While I’m not fond of text adventures myself, I understand it’s of huge value for people that do.
One thing that crossed my mind; as there’s a lot of text on the screen and possibly multi-page, would the engine benefit from using proportional fonts? You might already be aware of it, but Damien Guard made lots of them, which you can find on https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/
The driver you can find here: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/28171/ZX-Spectrum/FZX