Mactxd Information
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mactxd is a version of Mark Howell's txd program (part of his ztools package)
compiled for the Macintosh. txd is an application that disassembles Z-files (game
files produced by Infocom or generated with Graham Nelson's Inform language).
The interface (if you want to call it that) is unfriendly: Double-click on mactxd,
type in the name of the file you want to disassemble (the game file needs to be
in the same folder as mactxd), and be prepared to wait. (You can't move mactxd to
the background, but you can abort it by pressing command-period.) You'll watch the
disassembled code scroll by on the screen (just to let you know that it's
working), and after what seems like an eternity a text file called "transcript.txt"
will appear in the same directory as the game file. (See Graham Nelson's "The
Specification of the Z-Machine" to learn what all those opcodes mean.)
Warning: mactxd has been tested on only a couple machines, on only a very few
Z-files. (I've used it with version 3, 5, and 8 files; and it works on Macintosh
versions of Lost Treasures of Infocom files by ignoring the resource fork.) It
was first compiled on the day of my first exposure to C, with an ancient version
of THINK C; and the only way I could get it to compile was to remove some (by
"some" I mean "quite a lot") of Mark Howell's error-checking code. For all I
know, it will even work on your machine, but I cannot and will not be responsible
for any damage it causes. (I've set the default memory partition to 1,000K, which
is surely excessive; change the number in mactxd's Get Info box to slim down your
copy.)
Let us never speak of this again.
Robert M. Dickau
Champaign, Illinois, U.S.A.
email
[email protected], url
http://www.wolfram.com/~robertd
released 27 July 1996
