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Thursday, December 23, 2021

Woot! 2021 Vaguely interactive fiction for christmas zx version out now

the Woot! 2021 Christmas compilation is out now! You can read about the full contents and download it all from here.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6017

It includes the ZX spectrum version of my Vaguely interactive fiction for Christmas. Your work as a music video director takes you to Old Codgers Shed of Videomancy. Will this be your....... Last Christmas Ever?
Not really a Christmas ghost story but you know where I'm coming from. Go from location to location choosing the occasional option.

 

 It ended up being a lot bigger than I expected with the spectrum version loading in four chapters. I thought I had multiloads for spectrum sorted but it needed a lot of work to get going. I thought I would be able to have flexibility with individual chapters. With some having more text and some having more images. But found I couldn't load in a new chapter without having all the data aligned in the same place. So the main text, choices and image data all need to start in the same place in memory as they do in the first chapter. Even with adding padding automatically to the files I found I still needed to make minor adjustments manually and then check if files loaded correctly.


 The need to make the text and images fill the same amount of space would make completing a ZX version of UFO a Dracula very challenging. But I managed to wrestle and mangle the text into the space to complete this. With a bit of help from David acting as an advanced punctuation consultant and doing a legibility pass on the text. Thanks David.


As well as the spectrum version there is a HTML5 version here.
https://chip-fork.itch.io/last-ever