[cheezitman2001]

Everyone says that you should never use the "[" command.  Personnaly, I like it because it's simple, but, how am I supposed to do it?    This has probably been posted zillions of times, and everyone is gonna hate me for asking, but can anyone help?

[Terryn]

At the very least use *. Disable Mesg Edge and Message Row sometimes should be used with the * command.

Overlay text boxes are en vogue, but if you use extensive overlay and use overlay text then you need to create an overlay buffer.  Depends on whether you want to go through the trouble or not.

[cheezitman2001]

I'm sorry, but that made absolutely no sense at all.  I just started with MZX a few months ago, so I haven't even touched the overlay yet.  Could you go into more detail?

[Xeirxes]

Well, the easiest way to make a non-taking-up-space text-box is to turn your overlay on the board to transparent, then editing the overlay and putting the box there. But if you want an always-on overlay, and you want to have an overlay text box, you'll need to store the text box somewhere on the board and use the "copy overlay block" command to place it. This is complicated, though, so I suggest you just use the * command for now.

[Mr. Apol]

Hey, another way of doing this is to make the robot that supposed to be talking use the "write overlay" command.  It can take a while, but it's easy to do.  The problem is though, that it may use up too much memory if you have a lot of robots that use this method.

[Liquid-salt]

One problem you'll run into is "pausing" the game while your Overlay Dialogue box is open.  You can use the Freeze command for that.