Interactive Fiction with Gargoyle for the Iliad

[nekokami]

This is just a post to help others who might run into the same problem I had. I have old DOS formatted files of infocom games (Suspended and Starcross, my two all-time favorites). I couldn't get gargoyle to recognize these on the iLiad or on the PC (running XP). You want the content of the .DAT file in the DATA directory, but gargoyle won't recognize that extension. (The games do run on the Windows box if you double-click the .BAT file.) After a lot of digging around, I found a reference to changing the extension of .DAT files to the appropriate version of the Z interpreter. To find the appropriate version of the Z interpreter for your game, check the list at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/games.html. For example, all releases of Suspended were version 3 of the Z interpreter. I renamed the extension to .z3 and gargoyle recognized the file correctly, at least on the pc. (On the iLiad, unzip turned the zip file I had into a .img file, not what I wanted. More experimentation is still needed to get Suspended working on the iLiad. )

[mac]

Hi Adam ,what about a gargoyle's registry instaler?

In spanish languaje that link will be usefull
http://www.caad.es/index.php

[Adam B.]

What file extensions does Gargoyle support? If you can provide me with a list, I can setup a registry installer.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Adam B.

What file extensions does Gargoyle support? If you can provide me with a list, I can setup a registry installer.

Try this list: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ#How_...and_play_IF.3F

[nekokami]

Just thought I'd mention that Amazon currently has quite a few copies of many old Infocom games for reasonable prices (and some for very unreasonable prices).

[mac]

In windows version there are 2 extensions more *.agx (AGT games) and
*.sna (Level 9). I don´t know in Linux.
Thanks
Mac

[kissyfish]

For the life of me, I cannot get any of these to run in gargoyle.

I have renamed the .dat file to a .z3 file (asper the version of the z format for the game), and I edited the run.sh to reflect the name.

But none but zork will work.

Am I missing something here?

[naberhaus]

I agree... Anyone have any suggestions on how to get other IF titles to work? I was able to get colossal.hex to work, but I changed its name to hugozork.hex and replaced the original file.....

[w.m.vanvliet]

I think it's time to blow some new life into this wonderful Gargoyle thread. While Adam did a good job at porting the application, it is a shame his source is lost so I had to start over from scratch.

With result. I believe I have done the basic tweaks Adam has done (opening it in a window, keyboard pops up), but have gone a bit further to increase the size of the window and the font (can be done in the config file btw) to a better readable one. Also, this version is coimpiled with gtk2.0, which has a nicer load/save dialog for your games.

After this port, I went on vacation and spend quite a few hours playing various IF games, while thinking about what could be improved.

Things I am likely to include next are:
- Move the window to the top of the screen by default (any pointers to accomplish this are appreciated, standard window_move did not work)
- Fix window focus bug: after a load/save, the background window has focus, not the Gargoyle application
- Making the page-flip bar perform a page-up page-down, having long descriptions with a -more prompt at the bottom are annoying atm.
- Creating a loader for IF titles (for all those having trouble)
- Creating a nice installer
- Creating an option to take notes, having a piece of paper next to my Iliad somehow seems wrong
- Automatic mapping for the same reason

If you have any requests, I'm happy to hear them

For the code and executables I refer you to:
http://lassie.student.utwente.nl/iliad/gargoyle.zip
http://lassie.student.utwente.nl/ili...-source.tar.gz

In gargoyle.zip you fill find two folders. The first is the gargoyle program, the second is a folder called IF which contains a few manifest files for the various titles I was playing during my vacation. The actual games are in the gargoyle/games folder, the manifest files are just for convenience. Take a look at them (and the run.sh files) and I'm sure you can figure out how to add more games.

[nekokami]

A title loader would be much appreciated. As far as a note-taking utility, supporting the ability to run the existing iLiad notes in a split screen with Gargoyle would be ideal.

[w.m.vanvliet]

That would indeed be awesome. No idea how to go about doing that though, dang that closed sourceness of certain parts and the total lack of any documentation.

One more thing I want to do is copy the processor throttle code from the enhanced iPDF, looks simple enough and there really is no use for 400mhz while waiting for input.

[nekokami]

There's a way to do multiple apps running at once, but you have to reconfigure some buttons or provide some other way to switch between them. See elsewhere in the iLiad forums for instructions. I think it could be plausible.

[Sunn Sunn]

I'm soooo happy for you doing that, and the timing is excellent -- I just got back into iLiad IF and I'm turning my attention to gargoyle.

Personally, I wouldn't mind running the window full screen at all (and maybe that would help the focus bug when loading/saving) since the onscreen keyboard is movable and maybe one could just increase the bottom margin to make room for it there.

Where/how in the code do you change the window type, and how do you compile it? What dev env do you use? (I'm new to this stuff and I'm struggling over in this thread.)

There was a bug in Adam's release (probably upstream, though) where it would crash if I tried to restore more than once in a session. Is this still there? Guess I'm going to find out soon because I'm downloading your version now.

[Sunn Sunn]

The LED seems to blink more with this version than what I remember from Adam's version, and the physical buttons (flipbar (pgup/pgdn), and up/down arrow and enter key) doesn't seem to work.

[jrial]

In the config file, you may want to change the following line:

lcd             1       # 0=grayscale 1=subpixel

to

lcd             0       # 0=grayscale 1=subpixel

for obvious reasons.

Oh, and thanks for adapting/building/packaging this. I wonder how IF plays on the iLiad...