Example Z-code files

Included with Windows Frotz in the Examples directory are a few example Z-code files, demonstrating some of the interpreter's capabilities:

Unicode.z5

Unicode demonstrates input and output of Unicode characters. Firstly it demonstrates printing Unicode characters that have been added to the Z-code file's Zcharacter table, specifically the Euro currency symbol (Unicode 0x20AC), the copyright symbol (Unicode 0x00A9) and the trademark symbol (Unicode 0x2122). Unicode then prints out several character sets, covering the standard Latin-1 set, then the Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic sets.

Note that although most Windows fonts contain most of the commonly used Unicode characters, they do not usually contain them all. The Arial Unicode MS font from Microsoft contains all 20,000 odd characters.

Finally, Unicode demonstrates input. If you press a key, Unicode will try to tell you what it believes you have entered. If you have a Western European PC (and possibly others) then you can usually enter a Euro symbol by pressing Ctrl+Alt+4. If this is the case, you can see Unicode accepting the Euro symbol as input, even though it is not part of the standard Z-Machine characters, because the Euro symbol has been added to the file's Zcharacter table.

ZSpec11.z6

This program is a demonstration of the features added in the Z-Machine Standard Version 1.1, which the interpreter now implements. The most important new features introduced are true colour support, so that games can request a colour by specifying it as an RGB triplet, and transparent text, so that games can write text over an arbitrary background, such as a picture.