Now this is a strange-looking program, that can only be described as
a rather specialist utility. Its purpose is to reduce the amount of space
taken up by text messages, of the kind that you get in adventure games and,
as such, it is only likely to be of interest to those developing such programs.
It claims to be able to reduce text to 45% of its original size but one of the
main benefits of adventure writers, in my eyes, is that the coding prevents the
text from being read by those who want to cheat.
All that is required is for you to type in your text messages in the numerical
order that you want to recall them and then, after saving a copy in case of
disasters, tell the program to do its stuff. There follows quite a delay while
the processing takes place but after completion you can *SAVE both the data and
its decoding routines for reloading anywhere in memory that you want. To get a
particular message on screen, all that you need to do is poke the message number
into zero page and then call up this routine and it appears as if by magic.
Whilst there are some drawbacks, length of line and method of input, this is likely
to be a useful package for those wanting to get a quart into a pint pot in their
adventure programs.
1st December 1984
