Shiny New (Old) Ad-Tech in the ZZT Game Engine

Do you remember the shareware days of yore, when you would exit a game and it would display a splash screen nagging you to "REGISTER FOR THREE EXTRA BONUS WORLDS", or some rubbish to that effect.

Apparently ZZT has had these nag-ware capabilities this entire time! By simply packing plain text files named END1.MSG, END2.MSG, END3.MSG,  and END4.MSG into ZZT.DAT, and by removing the "registered" flag from ZZT.CFG, you too can transform the nag-ridden memories of yesteryear into the nag-filled future of tomorrow!

ECCE NAGSCREEN

To view a randomly selected nag-screen, simply press Q and then Y to exit ZZT. Exiting ZZT is perhaps worse than useless when playing in your web browser (you have to refresh the page to play the game again), but it still works.

Packing the ZZT.DAT file is a subject for another post, but if you want to get a head-start you can poke around the Reconstruction of ZZT and see how it does it.

As for the game itself, the credits have been updated to include the name of the person who helped me figure out how to get this working (thanks Noser!). Other than that (and one very minor spelling correction), no changes have been made to the game itself.

Enjoy your ad-ridden ZZT future! 😈😈😈