rossumur / zorkduino Goto Github PK

All 5 Solid Gold v5 editions (HHGG, LGOP, Planetfall, Wishbringer, Zork I), when displaying Invisiclues hints "i.e. hinthint" display the menu bar properly but render the hint entries themselves as black-on-black. When in "screen saver" mode, they become visible only when the screen is reversed.

SD Cards must be formatted the slow way in Windows 7, with FAT32 filesystem and 4096-byte sector size. FAT16-formatted cards do not work. exFAT is untested but almost certainly does not work. Nonstandard sector sizes in FAT32 are untested but similarly presumed an incompatible configuration.

Very fast cards (such as my 1gb SanDisk Extreme III, a Class 6 card) or not-super-tiny, at least by 2018 standards, cards (such as my "Smart" brand 4gb MicroSD card in an SD adapter (which works fine in Chinese iPod Shuffle/Nano clones) do not work.

When compiling and uploading the sketch, the 1.0.6 ("classic") version of the Arduino IDE absolutely MUST be used. The code has apparently remained untouched since some time in 2014. If you use any of the more recent versions of the IDE, several commands that have since been deprecated must be changed. The Arduino forum will very kindly walk you through this, if you ask them -- or at least, they did for me -- but what they won't tell you is that this makes the firmware reboot your Arduino upon attempted load of any text adventure. Sometimes this reboot will happen upon selection of the text adventure; sometimes it will happen upon apparent completion of loading the adventure. Occasionally, the Arduino will not reset, but rather hang, with only a single line of text (or a white bar) across the top of the screen. At any rate, the overall product will be a decidedly non-functional Zorkduino.

Lastly, contact information for Rossumur is vestigial at best and can be removed. I have attempted contact multiple times, all of which have been met with complete and utter radio silence. While the emails did not bounce, they were likewise not replied to.

As an aside, if, like me, you choose to build your Zorkduino using Chinese eBay electronic bits, a Solidtek (aka Adesso aka Keysonic) ACK-595 keyboard for the chassis, a LaCie dual-voltage brick with its very strange Kycon power connector, and a 7-inch 12v "backup camera" LCD -- make absolutely sure you get the pinout of the power connector correct, as neither the Arduino CH340 Nano, the SD card, or the keyboard controller are 12v tolerant and will cook themselves dead in an instant (this is somehow easier said than done in the very uncivilized wee hours of the morning) and the display, although it will be unharmed by undervolting to 5v, it certainly will not display properly. Also, it's probably a good idea to invest in a screen that has a decent resolution (at least 800x480) as the cheaper-than-dirt (and consequently horrendous) 480x234 displays tend not to make for readable text in this application -- at least, unless your eyesight is significantly better than mine. (In my defense, I have astigmatism and nearsightedness severe enough to require the use of Professor Farnsworth style glasses.)

I can be reached for relevant replies both constructive and otherwise, retaliatory insults, derogatory sarcasm, and irrelevant blathering at [email protected] -- just please don't ask me to give you photos of my Zorkduino build unless you want to go blind. The consequences of an all-nighter build that could have gone better in several dramatic ways has left its mark on this project -- it hit every branch on the ugly electronics tree on the way down. That said, if you ask... ;) just don't say I didn't warn you...

Once you type anything other than "restore" and press Enter to start the game, it crashes back to the game selection menu.

The JZIP interpreter handles them fine and they are quite playable on the Zorkduino if given the "wrong" extension (i.e. z3 or z5). This affects A Mind Forever Voyaging, Bureaucracy, Nord and Bert, and Trinity.

Changing line 178 of zorkduino.ino from:

if (n == '3' || n == '5' || n == '7') // .z3,.z5,.z7 etc

to:

if (n == '3' || n == '4' | n == '5' || n == '7') // .z3,.z4,.z5,.z7 etc

resolves the issue.

In addition, V7 games were never really supported (or generated) by any interpreter, but V8 (i.e. 512K) games are quite prevalent as created with the Inform compiler. I am not certain whether zorkduino's virtual memory space would properly support a V8 title.