What file type is needed to run a Level9 game in Spatterlight or Gargoyle?

General
1

Beginners question here.
I’ve got the Level 9 Colossal Cave file for the BBC Micro from the beebgames.zip on ifarchive.org. But neither Spatterlight or Gargoyle recognise it as a game that I can play. What do I need to do?

  1. Is it a matter of renaming to some particular file extension?
  2. I remember from the distant past a program called L9Cut. Do I need to use that? I got a version for the Mac. But I get the error “L9Cut: V1 datafile extraction not supported”.
  3. Is there a version of the game online somewhere that’s known to work?
  4. Am I missing something obvious?
2

I think you’ll need a BBC Micro emulator to play that specific version. (I use BeebEm: BeebEm - BBC Micro and Master 128 Emulator (mkw.me.uk))

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3

Thanks. Yes I can do that. In fact I can play it on a BBC Emulator online here: Complete BBC Micro Games Archive - Play

But I actually want to try out Spatterlight and Gargoyle. So even if it means getting a different version of the game file, that would be the thing. But I just don’t know what it needs.

4

I assume you’re using a Mac, from the Spatterlight reference, which I am not. But I have quickly checked by extracting the contents of the “ColossalAdventure.zip” archive that’s in that zip file, and the Level9 interpreter on Windows will definitely play it, if you load the file “COLOSSA1”.

Both Spatterlight and Gargoyle contain the Level9 interpreter, so you must be fairly close to having it work. You shouldn’t need to do anything further to extract the data once you’ve got that file.

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5

You might have to rename the file to give it a “.L9” extension.

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6

Thanks guys. Adding the .L9 extension worked for both Spatterlight and Gargoyle.
I thought I had tried that, but obviously not.
Sorry to waste your time.

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7

No problem!

Ideally, Spatterlight should be able to open extension-less files. I’m not sure how hard that would be to implement. I think the Babel library, which Spatterlight uses for format detection, expects files to have an extension.

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