Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Damnit now I wanna kick back with a good drink and some paper to slowly draw a map upon and have another go at Curses.

But first I have to pick an interpreter for my Mac. The list[1] pointed to in this article is spectacularly unhelpful, what with being a series of directories with names largely derived from spells in Enchanter and no hints as to what platforms they're on, or what the strengths and weaknesses of each is.

The IFDB page for Curses[2] that this article links to points me to a page on another site entirely[3] for interpreter recommendations. Its suggestion for Windows, Mac, and Linux is Lectrote[4]. Which is an Electron app that binds together no less than four different adventure game interpreters. I am generally adverse to Electron apps for the usual reasons (CPU/RAM hogs that consistently break OSX's built-in spellcheck/text expansion on all their text input fields) but somehow, contemplating the teetering pile of virtuality that running a Javascript Z-machine with an entire web browser strapped on the side entails, I feel like this is entirely appropriate in this case.

I also feel like the process of digging through this twisty maze of web links, all different, may have made my score go up.

1: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/inter...

2: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=plvzam05bmz3enh8

3: http://brasslantern.org/players/howto/tadownload-c.html

4: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote/releases

I like Gargoyle: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

It supports a slew of formats and focuses on good typography.

You could just click the "Play On-line" button from link #2 and arrive at http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

On Linux (not sure if Mac is similar or not) I just use Gargoyle as one commenter pointed out below. It works amazingly well and can run all kinds of IF formats.

I'd love to find a group of people to play IF with some day as a group activity. I was too young during its popular days. Now it is too niche for me to convince any friends or co-workers to give it a go.

Curses is super long. If you want something just as beautiful (perhaps more so), but shorter, try anything from Emily Short. She has a few that take anywhere from 15 minutes to a day to play through (Galatea, Alabaster, Bronze...etc). I never finished City of Secrets, but really loved the world.

A completely separate author wrote Blue Lacuna which I'm about 1/2 through.

> Curses is super long.

It's also a very "old school" interactive fiction game design -- heavily item-driven puzzles, some of which can be made unsolveable by mistake, and at least one maze. Even the author has retrospectively described it as being "by any reasonable standard too hard".

> I'd love to find a group of people to play IF with some day as a group activity. I was too young during its popular days. Now it is too niche for me to convince any friends or co-workers to give it a go.

I've been joking that my Twitch channel is an exercise in finding extremes that likely no one would actually watch. It mostly only has stuff streamed to it, for instance, because Sea of Thieves gives some small in-game rewards for streaming, and I like finding a lot of the less exciting parts of SoT to stream (including jokes about some of it being Pirate ASMArrr for how quiet and soft I play it sometimes).

Anyway, long rambling prologue to: now I really want to try Twitch streaming some text adventures. This sounds like a very appropriate use of the wonders of modern game video streaming technology, both sarcastically in the sense of my above finding silly things to stream for streaming's sake, and not at all facetiously in that if it did somehow attract an audience magically or mysteriously that sounds like an amazing way to play such games.

So there are still people who make Commodore and ZxSpectrum games (apparently commercially too).

I found this one recently (https://thestoryfix.blog/2019/02/03/interview-stefan-vogt-ta...)

and since I couldn't play it (don't own the hardware or want to fool with an editor) I watched someone play the entire game on YouTube one night when my wife was out of town. It was a blast.

I've only looked at twitch once before and it was kinda fun. Do you have a username there or something I can watch for?

Emily Short https://emshort.blog/my-work/

> Emily Short

... who, incidentally, is married to Graham Nelson.

I don't know what but if it's consider "best" or not, but I use Zoom:

https://www.logicalshift.co.uk/mac/zoom.html

I've always used Rezrov [1] as my Z-machine interpreter. Pure Perl, runs like a champ on my mac.

1: http://edmonson.paunix.org/rezrov/

If you have an iOS device, you may like Craig Smith‘s port of Frotz. It includes a few games, including Curses I think. You can also browse the IFDB and download other games from inside the app.

The de-facto standard:

https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/

Frotz is a good Z-machine interpreter, and there seems to be a MacFrotz:

https://www.thinkyhead.com/macfrotz

You might be able to compile the original frotz:

https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/

There's more here:

http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Interpreter

MacFrotz is not a viable option. Its last release was in 2004, it's only available as a PowerPC application, and there is no source available. (I suspect it was originally built to run on Classic Mac OS.)

Building frotz from source should work fine, though.

The original frotz is installable with homebrew on macOS

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