Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?


5 Nov 1995 21:48:12 GMT

In article <ckt-0411952348010001@ckt.vip.best.com>,
Chris Thomas <ckt@best.com> wrote:

>Going from MaxZip to the TADS interpreter makes me very sad, and I now
>avoid TADS games because of this!

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for you to improve it, since your
machine so acutely exhibits the problem. (For the record, I've run Legend
extensively on a Quadra 950 and a PowerMac 7200/90 and haven't found either
one to be slow.)

Sign an NDA. Get the source from Mike. Make a better version. Really:
we're all in this together; no one's making money providing you with these
tools, and I no longer have time to devote to free stuff.

Long ago, I was unsatisfied with the TADS ports, like you. I got the
source from Mike and ported TADS to Unix machines. I am not special. You
can do this too, for the Mac.

>The wait on a PowerMac is often a second or more. I don't think the
>machine makes a huge difference, honestly.

That's quite a generalization from a single data point. MacWeek has been
reporting that 7000 series PowerMaccs perform poorly (sub-Qudra speeds) on
a wide range of tasks. Supposedly, it helps a lot to have an L2 cache. I
don't have one on my 7200/90, and it seems fine. But I don't do much
compute-intensive work on it, either.

Lots of people have gotten a great deal of enjoyment from running TADS
games on much slower machines. If you can't, do your own native PowerMac
port of the interpreter, with support for whizzy fonts, styles, and
whatever other frills you need to make yourself happy. Your machine is
much faster than my 486/33 (not to mention that DOS real mode is such
garbage that it halves the practical performance of the machine), and I've
logged thousands of hours on TADS games with it. (And I wrote and
playtested UU2 on an 8Mhz 68000 Atari ST, and the performance was certainly
acceptable.)

Dave Baggett
__
dmb@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)