Spatterlight 0.9.1 has a new experimental ScottFree interpreter with support for ZX Spectrum format games and graphics.
Games like Gremlins, Robin of Sherwood , Questprobe I and II and Seas of Blood are playable with pictures and animations.
It also adds some modern conveniences such as restart and undo to the original ScottFree games.
Get it here.
Report the bugs here.
Will this release go out to the Mac App Store?
Also, are there any interpreters that Gargoyle supports that Spatterlight doesn’t?
If nobody reports any serious bugs with this one, I’ll update the App Store version.
Gargoyle offers Git as an alternative to Glulxe. I think that is the only one that Spatterlight doesn’t have.
However, since Gargoyle dropped Geas, Spatterlight has two barely working interpreters that Gargoyle hasn’t: Quill and Geas. Both should probably be removed from Spatterlight as well.
I still wish there was a version of Spatterlight or Gargoyle that was accessible for screen reader users on Windows.
Of course, due to the nature of the garglk library, this probably won’t happen.
The wiki looks accurate to me. The formats it doesn’t mention are those that don’t work properly. I’ll see if I can get some good screenshots.
What is the best way to accommodate screen readers on Windows? Since all the interpreters are Glk-based, it would be pretty easy to cobble together something that supports all the Gargoyle/Spatterlight formats but with a screen reader-friendly Glk implementation. Of course, that depends on there being such a Glk implementation…
Possible implementations include Windows Glk or cheapglk. Windows Glk would provide a proper Windows GUI but with a more traditional approach to using text that might work with a screen reader.
A cheapglk-based version would run in the Windows terminal, using only text input and output. If a screen reader can launch a program and read/write to standard in/out, this would probably be ideal: it has no frills, as it’s completely text-based.
The native WinGLK (or the Windows version of GLKTerm) library works fine under Windows. A GLKTerm-based Linux version would be nice as well, but I’m not on Linux natively.
(I do know a few blind folks who are, though.)
Thank you for offering to do this. A lot of folks don’t take visually impaired gamers seriously, although I’ve noticed this is less true of the IF community than the wider indie game community. (That’s starting to change, though, thanks to several releases such as the rhythm racing game Sequence Storm, an accessibility patch for Hearthstone, and many others.)
I think you said before that Parchment is somewhat useable via screen reader? Have you tried Lectrote? I’d guess that it’s largely the same as Parchment, as both are just using a web browser for output.
Ok, I’ve done some ugly hacking on Gargoyle to build its interpreters against Windows Glk. The code is here, with binaries available here. I’ve barely tested these, but Z-machine and Glulx games seem to work fine. There’s currently no front-end: you’ve got to run the interpreters manually.
Nothing for any other Glk implementations at the moment. The modifications I made have some Windows Glk-specific code, but it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to get things building against something else.
(This should probably be separated into another thread, since we’re not talking about Spatterlight any more.)
The Gargoyle + Windows Glk build works fine, but it works no better than Windows Glulxe or Windows Frotz, raising questions about what the “point” of a Gargoyle + WinGLK build would be.
I note that Windows Glulxe renders crisply on my HiDPI Windows machine and that this Gargoyle + WinGlk build doesn’t.
(I guess the idea is that it would be possible to run Gargoyle’s more unusual backends in WinGLK?)
Yeah, I realized after I posted that this was a hijack of the topic. Sorry Petter!
Yes, that’d be the advantage here: all Gargoyle interpreters available in a format that is compatible with screen readers. This is purely meant to aid in screen reading, and wasn’t intended for general use. It truly is a hack.
Ultimately something based on RemGlk would probably be a better approach, but would take more effort.
