(Neatly copy and pasted from my R*IF announcement)
QTads is a cross-platform, multimedia interpreter for TADS games. It runs in Linux, Mac OS X (10.5+), MS Windows (with a few problems) and Haiku (though binaries are not yet provided for Haiku). It probably runs on many more, as long as the Qt and SDL libraries are available.
QTads version 2, the first to include Multimedia TADS support, was in development for seven months (though with big pauses in-between), and is now finally out. You can find binaries as well as the source code at:
Some stuff had to go during the rewrite of major parts of the code. This was necessary in order to decrease the initial porting effort and to release something that works within a reasonable time frame. I’m hoping to bring everything back bit by bit as development progresses.
Thanks for all your work on this! And thanks as well for working under a free / open source license.
Gargoyle had some similar sound issues under Windows with SDL_Mixer. I ended up using SDL_Sound to decode compressed music in chunks. I will look into submitting a patch once my own pre-release madness dies down.
The sound implementation is currently somewhat half-assed anyway. It decodes the whole file into memory prior to playback (which is the right thing to do for effects and other short samples, but not for background music.) This seems to be very fast on every system, except for Windows (I suspect due to Windows missing mmap()). Also, SMPEG seems to sometimes play 22kHz MP3s at double speed.
Best thing I should probably do is write a real sound playing routine with mixing (perhaps using libsamplerate), and use libmad for the decoding (the only reason I went with SMPEG is that MAD is totally undocumented.)
Anyway, if anyone is writing a TADS game that has audio, it’s highly recommended to choose the Ogg Vorbis format instead of MP3; you get much higher quality (indistinguishable from CD quality) at a much smaller file size. And there’s no confusion with people playing the game about the need of any installed codecs and such, since Vorbis support is built-in into all multimedia interpreters. There is no reason at all to use MP3.