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View Full Version : Gargoyle For Pandora - Interactive Fiction / Text Adventure Package



wraggster
August 24th, 2010, 20:51
News via http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=56186&view=findpost&p=909715

The Pandora was _made_ for this!

Some of you may be familiar with my early Kronos project for Pandora, which currently lets you play Magnetic Scrolls text adventure games (though it will soon offer also Scott Adams and Infocom/zmachine type games as well.) Kronos is not so expansive as Gargoyloe, but does aim for stuff like auto-mapping and whatnot.

Anyway, Gargoyle is an interpreter collection with goals of being very attractive to look at and readable (including subpixel rendering and gorgeous fonts and so forth, as well as supporting customization to typesetting) and to support many interpreters; to this end, it supports such true classics as Infocom/zmachine style (including modern formats like the newer Inform stuff from the indie scene), Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, Hugo, TADS 2 and 3, and more. (Adrift, Agility, Alan 2 and 3, Glulxe, GIT, a whole slew of these guys.) The only one that I often hit that is not supported is Scott Adams, but I'll fold that into Kronos.

Real gargoyle homepage is: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

Download is here (currently uploading to appstore as well): http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/gargoyle/gargoyle_20100823.pnd
Screenshot is here: http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/gargoyle/screen.png
App store download is up: http://apps.open-pandora.org/cgi-bin/viewapp.pl?/Game/gargoyle_20100823.inf

The package should 'just work'; run the pnd from your menu of choice, and picka story-file using my silly little picker. It will try to figure out which interpreter to use based on the file name .. ie: .z* will go to frotz (more or less), and .mag to magnetic srolls. It usually makes sense, but some like '.dat' are too generic and may go to the wrong interpreter.

When you want to save (ie: type "save" into the interpreter) it'll give you a directory picker, so you can specify where; likewise for 'restore' or 'load'. So no worries about files going to some hidden location.

Should you wish to override the default choices for look and feal, you can override the garglk.ini file, but creating a new one in /pandora/appdata/gargoyle/garglk.ini -- in there you can specify different fonts, justification or not, subpixel rendering or not, etc and so on; let me know if you would like details or not

jeff