There are so many kinds of games out there. It would be nice if I could find an interpreter that would recognise what kind of game I’m trying to load, then interpret it, regardless of type.
I know with my wife, who is new to IF, this was a pitfall of getting her into it- each time we downloaded a game off IFDB she was interested in, it needed a new interpreter. We both have games on our “wish list” we can’t play without downloading something else…
Zoom (for Mac) is another option. It is updated more regularly than Spatterlight, but doesn’t yet support sound (an issue in only a tiny fraction of games). It also integrates nicely with IFDB.
I’ve had trouble running ADRIFT games in Zoom (the latest version, according to the “Check Update” feature). Which put me back on the “Which interpreter do I need?” carousel. These games do run on Spatterlight – there seem to be some ADRIFT games that wind up buggy if you’re not using the ADRIFT runner, but there’s not much to be done about that from the player’s side, I guess.
(It’s also my understanding that a couple of games – specifically Alabaster and Rover’s Day Out – don’t or at one point didn’t run well on Spatterlight.)
Spatterlight is no longer maintained. IIRC it comes with Glulxe 0.4.3, which is missing some newer features (accelerated opcodes, floating-point math) and some bug fixes. Alabaster benefits from accelerated opcodes, and Rover’s Day Out needs the print_to_array(buf) fix.
Many of the other Glk interpreters it bundles are also outdated, with the Alan, Frotz, and TADS code being significantly behind.
I haven’t tried it, but I think an enterprising individual could merge in the shared interpreter sources from Gargoyle and build an updated version of Spatterlight without too many headaches. Likely with Tor’s blessing; he has supported the ongoing development of Gargoyle.