| Home | Previous | Next |
In order to see images for version 6 games, you will requires the resources in Blorb format: Zoom does not support any other format for images. All new games should come with images in this format. For the old infocom games, Blorb versions of the game resources are available from the IF-Archive, at http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmedia.html. See the sections on configuration for information on how to get Zoom to load these resources.
Zoom does not support JPEG images: there are currently patent issues with this format.
Some version 6 games may not deal with proportional fonts adequately: if you find a game is drawing text in the wrong place, try using a fixed pitch font for the 'roman' style.
The Macintosh version of the Infocom games are distributed as a package containing both the interpreter and the data. In order to run these games under Zoom, you will need to seperate the data from the program. Fortunately, that isn't hard. To do the conversion, copy the game to the desktop, then fire up a Terminal session and use the following commands:
cp "~/Desktop/GAME" "~/Desktop/GAME.z5"
(Substituting the name of the game for GAME). The file 'GAME.z5' will now just contain the data, and you should be able to double-click it to load it into Zoom. This technique may also work for other files that you know are Z-Code files, but that you are unable to open in Zoom for some reason.
If you have another interpreter installed, it may be set as the default editor for Infocom files: this means that when you open a game in the finder, that other interpreter loads instead of Zoom. If you want Zoom to be the default interpreter for a game (or for all games), select that game in the finder, choose 'Show Info' (Command-I, or from the File menu), and choose Zoom from the 'Open with Application' dialog. Click 'Change All' to set Zoom as the default interpreter for all games of this type.
Zoom offers both QuickDraw and Quartz font rendering. Unicode is supported in both systems. The Quartz system is, however, somewhat slower than its QuickDraw equivalent (partly due to the lack of adequate functions for measuring text dimensions).
(This only applies to people compiling Zoom)
If image quality is low, this may be because your version of Zoom was compiled using QuickTime to draw its images. This happens if Zoom was compiled without libpng available: it is highly recommended to install libpng if you are compiling under Mac OS X (binary releases have libpng built-in, so this won't be an issue).
When you compile Zoom, make sure that libpng is available, or image support will be disabled.
If you find image rendering is slow, make sure that optimisation
was turned on when you compiled Zoom. ./configure
CFLAGS=-O9 will always do the trick. If you find images are
still too slow, you may find that undefining QUALITY_HIGH at the
start of image_libpng.c has some effect on the speed.
The font situation under X-Windows is slightly confused. The standard X font system (which Zoom prefers to use as a last resort) does not support anti-aliasing or Unicode. Xft is the preferred rendering system: it has full support for Unicode, it's fast and it's flexible. Unfortunately, it might require some configuration on your system. If games render strangely, it may be that Xft is not set up, and is using daft defaults for the fixed pitch fonts.
If you have problems with the font rendering, it might well be Xft. To check this, set 'antialias' to 'no' in the .zoomrc file and see if that solves the problem. If it does, it may be worth taking the time to set up Xft properly (if you use KDE, this will also allow you to use the antialiased fonts there).
Xft is set up through the configuration file 'XftConfig'. If you have X installed under /usr/X11R6/, this should be in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/ by default. A minimal file might be:
dir "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType" dir "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
Remove the first line if you don't have a TrueType font directory in your installation. See http://keithp.com/~keithp/fonts/XftConfig for a larger example of an XftConfig file. Most X11 distributions should have a courier font in the Type1 directory.
Zoom sometimes has trouble calculating the screen metrics for a T1Lib font. This is not usually noticable, but it does mean that you should not use T1Lib for the fixed pitch fonts, and it creates a glitch on the status bar in Infocom's Arthur (T1Lib fonts are specified by filename rather than by their X font specifier).
This section lists some problems with older versions of Zoom.
antialias option does not disable Xft. (Comment
out #define HAVE_XFT in config.h and recompile to
disable Xft in this revision).
Zoom written by Andrew Hunter. Mail any suggestions, bug reports or abuse to andrew@logicalshift.demon.co.uk