If anyone who isn’t on a Mac wants to try out the new ScottFree fork mentioned here, and knows how to build Gargoyle, it can be found in this branch:
It builds fine on my Mac but might have problems on other systems.
Among the new features, apart from graphics and ZX Spectrum support, are:
- Restart, undo, ram save, ram load, transcript.
- Universal abbreviations for directions and inventory, x for examine, l for look, z for wait.
- Improved TAKE ALL and DROP ALL which are supposed to not break older games.
- Commands can be chained together by commas or periods.
- Multiple nouns such as TAKE AXE AND FISH work (by creating two separate commands.)
- Changes in room descriptions will create pauses where appropriate, so that they are visible to the player.
- Unicode support for non-ASCII characters in input and output, as demonstrated by the German and Spanish versions of Gremlins.
- Automatic line breaking in the room description window.
These are all a bit experimental and no doubt still have bugs. The main problem I’ve noticed in Gargoyle is that input becomes very slow and eventually soft locks at the animated waterfall in Robin of Sherwood.