Yes, you can definitely do this in I7, compiling to Glulx. Using the Flexible Windows extension, you can have separate “windows” (really panes within the larger game window) that display either text or graphics. If you create one or more subsidiary text windows and use Emily Short’s Basic Hyperlinks extension to hyperlink the items you print in those windows, you’ll get something very like the verbs and noun lists of the Eric the Unready interface (including automatic handling of scrollbars when the text goes beyond the bounds of the window). Currently the exact look of the hyperlinks will be controlled by the interpreter used to play the game, but the forthcoming CSS-based Glulx style system will, I believe, allow you as the author to control the styling.
As for the compass rose, Emily released a game called City of Secrets a while back that included something like the compass rose interface you were discussing earlier. CoS displayed “mood” graphics, the location name, and a clickable compass rose in a graphics window(pane), and had a smaller text window beneath the main window that provided clickable text–mostly used for conversation and help menus. CoS was written in I6 but all of this is quite doable in I7.
George mentioned my extensions for adding graphics like compass roses and so on. There’s an extension available now (Graphical Window Sprites) that will let you do compass roses, clickable maps that reveal themselves as the player moves the game-world, etc., but only in a single graphics window. It also comes with a set of examples, including a clickable compass rose.
I’m currently working on a set of extensions that will be a much more powerful version of Graphical Window Sprites, one that works with any number of graphical windows and includes lots of new features. Actually, I’m pretty well done with it, and am engaged in writing the documentation (pure drudgery, unfortunately). This thread has more information.
–Erik