Borogove transcripts

Does anybody happen to know where Borogove saves transcript files on a mac? It just brings up “save” with no possibility of choosing a location. I’ve searched everywhere I can think of and can’t find it. The “finder” on a mac is possibly the least useful tool in all of computerdom.

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As far as I know Parchment (which is the interpreter Borogove uses) doesn’t save the transcript to your computer but to your browser’s memory.

You can get the transcript from the browser but it’s fiddly:

  • Go to the game page in your browser.
  • Open the Javascript console: If you’re on a mac: in Firefox you can press Command+Option+K, in Chrome press Command+Option+J, in Safari you want Command+Option+C
    If you’re on windows I don’t know the shortcuts but you can find it by poking around in the menus, it’ll be in a sub menu along the lines of “Developer Tools”.
  • Once you have the console open it should look something like this:

    It might open in a pane on the side of the screen instead of the bottom or even in its own window, that’s fine.
  • At the bottom of the console paste the following bit of javascript:
JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("content:transcript::NAME")).map(c => String.fromCharCode(c)).join("")

But replace NAME with the name of the transcript.

  • press enter and you should get your transcript. In Chrome it might be all on one line, so you’ll want to right click on the transcript and select “copy string content”:

    Then in TextEdit or whatever text editor you prefer to use you can paste and you should have your transcript in a usable format.
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There’s supposed to be a less hacky(*) way to view the transcripts:

  • Type RESTORE, or any other command which displays a file dialog
  • Press the “Edit” button.
  • You will now see a list of saved files, including transcripts.
  • Select a transcript and hit “Display”.
  • The transcript will pop up in a scrollable pane.

However, the “Edit” button doesn’t work on Borogove. Something must be connected up wrong in there.

(* I admit this is still pretty hacky, but it doesn’t require going into the JS console.)

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Thanks y’all! It’s always surprising when I’m not the problem.

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Clicking the Edit button doesn’t work for me at iplayif.com either, both throw “Uncaught ReferenceError: Cannot access ‘i’ before initialization” in the console.

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Well, rats. I was thinking this would be so much easier for beta testing. I suppose everyone’s used to getting gblorb files, though.

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Think I’ve found the cause, a variable is being used before being initialised. dialog.js mustn’t have been linted properly.

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Try Fix uninitialized-variable error. · erkyrath/glkote@519cdf7 · GitHub .

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Fixed in Parchment/iplayif.com. Was frustrating to realise that ESLint doesn’t actually report these errors because of complicated JS reasons (the temporal dead zone). There is another ESLint rule I could turn on which does highlight them, but it also highlights a lot of valid code.

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Great, glad I was right about where the error was. :)

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Did the update break something? Parchment won’t load any story files anymore, the compass logo just spins indefinitely.

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