What interpreter(s) would you recommend to someone who needed Glulx sound support? 4 or 5 years ago, I thought the usual recommendations were Glulxe or Gargoyle for Windows, or Spatterlight for Mac. Has the answer changed since then?
I don’t think so. Windows Glulxe/Git has the most complete Glk sound implementation that I know of.
Spatterlight is supposed to have full Glk sound support, but I recently noticed a bug in the autorestore code that causes the title screen music of Kerkerkruip to never fade out.
When I finish with the audio overhaul release of Unix Frotz, I’ll be working on adding audio support to Zarf’s TermGLK library.
If you say 4 or 5 years ago, Spatterlight wasn’t developed in the intervening years, but someone has semi-recently (last year or two?) begun to work on it anew. So there is a current WIP of Spatterlight.
That said, on the Mac, I still look to Gargoyle, probably just because it’s been sitting there, being stable. Its sound notifications aren’t up to scratch, and I don’t think it has every sound function from the current glk spec, but it does the basics fine. Play/start/stop/volume. If you make your fades with an extension like Dan Stelzer’s Music, they’ll run in Gargoyle, too. (i.e. I think there are now fades in the actual spec, but Gargoyle doesn’t support that spec.)
-Wade
I tried to port the sound code of Spatterlight to Gargoyle (helped by the fact that it is originally based on Gargoyle’s sound code), but couldn’t work out how to make notifications work in a cross-platform way. My pull requests are still open if anyone is interested.
Is TermGLK associated with a specific interpreter? (Or is it an interpreter?)
Hmm. I noticed that on the “Interpreter” page on IFWiki, in the table of interpreters, Gargoyle is not listed in the Glulx column for Windows or for any of the Mac platforms. Should it be?
TermGLK is an implementation of the GLK library that uses a terminal interface on Unix systems. GLK was created for the Glulx interpreter, but is not specific to it. There are several Z-machine and other Interactive Fiction engines that use GLK. Unix Frotz, however, does not.
I know around a year ago I had to upgrade Gargoyle for Mac from a Github page rather than the link from the main Gargoyle site. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
That is still the case. The latest official release of Gargoyle from 2015 won’t work on macOS 10.12 Sierra or later, but there are several unofficial builds on Github that work.
Ok–so on the IFWiki “Interpreter” page, would it make sense to include–in the “Glulx” column–the official release of Gargoyle in the Mac OS X row, and the Windows row, and to add this unofficial build to the macOS 10.12 Sierra row? (I don’t know what the rationale is for which interpreters are included and which are not.)
Thanks for all the responses to the original question.