Thanks for the info on VoiceOver. This appears to be a UI navigation thing. There’s another interface for pure tts as well i might look at as well.
1 Like
Are you thinking of the original binaries or the emulator files. I’m not sure I could distribute the original binaries without infringement, but certainly the emulator files.
Also, it would be nice to have those little scrolls animating again. The emulators never did that and nor did the remasters sadly.
1 Like
There are several ways to do text-to-speech, but at least in older versions of macOS, the only way to make it respect the system-wide settings for things such as speed and verbosity was to use NSAccessibility announcements.
Yes, I meant the original executables to run in DOS/Amiga/whatever emulators. I had hoped that Strand Game had the rights to those as well. As I mentioned, most (?) of them are already in their Brahman GitLab repository, so in a sense they’re already distributing them.
I remember thinking how cool it was that the Corruption menus were changed to fit the theme of the game. Even the remastered versions that Magnet Scrolls themselves released back in the day did away with that, though.
(I only found a second-hand CD without the manuals, and I never could find a window layout I liked… Still, a nice thing to have.)
JJ’s sister and brother in law being IN Jinxter now is one of the craziest things ever, I love it.
Quick question about the game itself. I missed the bus stop I think I was supposed to take and now I’m in the middle of nowhere. If I go east or west lots of times, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere good. Did I screw my game up and should I restart? I now have zero memories of this from the 1980s, I am seeing.
2 Likes
You’re in Neverending Lane.
Anywhere you get off the bus has East and West stretch out endlessly. How the bus gets around this I don’t know. I do know that if you don’t get off in front of your own house, you sure can’t get there by walking.
–>RESTART
1 Like
I think you can walk back. Not 100% sure, but i think it keeps track of your relative position in “neverending lane”.
The problem is, it might be a long walk, depending on how far the bus has got 
1 Like
Yes, the little unfurling scrolls or the Filofax papers in Corruption were not there for the Magnetic Windows editions, as in your screenshot.
However, the window system was very nice. Check out the proportional spaced fonts. I wonder if this was the first IF that did this?
Edit: No, it would have been IF on the Machintosh.
1 Like
Oh wow. It would indeed be a long walk. I remember trying to walk to my house after being thrown out of the bus for ignoring the ticket inspector. After about 15 moves in either direction, I was convinced I was caught in a loop. I should have been more persistent.
When you start walking from your porch, then I can confirm that your position is tracked and you can get back to your house.
Another, totally unrelated, question:
Spoilery question about long-term puzzle:
You can only get to the castle where Xam is being held captive by riding the flying unicorn. You can only ride the flying unicorn after you put the saddle on it. You can release the unicorn and get the saddle by casting the DOOFER-spell on the wooden unicorn on the carousel.
However, you can’t take the saddle with you on the cloud-ride to the Red Station. The solution is to use the post-office in Aquitania-village to mail the saddle to the station. But there is no way of knowing any of this, or even that a station exists, except to actually go there, take the train and discover the unicorn. At which point you realise that the mail-depot in the station is there for a reason, to pick up the saddle you could have mailed there 103 turns ago.
At this point, I restored to an earlier save and just mailed the saddle to the station straight away. Is there a way to get back to Aquitania-village after discovering the unicorn (and the need for the saddle), or is this really a Try-Zombify-RESTORE puzzle?
Yes, in the original game, it is one of the nasty try-restore-puzzles… which got fixed in the remaster as well 
1 Like
Just to add… Indeed I did some tests with feeding VoiceOver through the Qt accessibility classes, but it didn‘t really work. This is partly due to technical obstacles like text being gpu rendered and the design of the app. Our main goal was to make the games mobile friendly, so there is a quite some stuff that IMHO doesn‘t play nice with screen readers like drag&drop, visual navigation, graphical map,…
In the end we need a different approach for screen readers, I guess. We have been discussing this and it is on our list, so hopefully at some point we will have a solution.
1 Like
I don’t know much about Qt, but it should be possible to link against the system AVFoundation library and call its API directly to speak any game text. See Speech synthesis | Apple Developer Documentation