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egypturnash

Holy shit it now supports basically every text adventure ever:

ADRIFT (except for version 5)

AdvSys

AGT

Alan 2 & 3

Archetype (newly reimplemented for Glk from the original Pascal sources)

Hugo

JACL

Level 9

Magnetic Scrolls

Quest

Scott Adams

ZCode (all ZCode games except the Infocom graphical version 6 games).

Currently, more than 1600 games are detected and supported.

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The only notable text adventure interpreter I can think of offhand that's not on this list is The Quill.

Testing it out though, I think it's got a few versions to go before it'll replace more focused interpreters - it won't load any zcode games distributed in the modern '.gblorb' format, and the decision to render all the text as white on searing blue, at 640x480, is... well, it sure is an accurate emulation of the experience of playing a text adventure back in the nineties, I'll give it that. Still, the breadth of support is super impressive!

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Notable missing text adventure interpreter: TADS. I'm guessing this is a licensing issue, because the only Free Software implementation is GPL3 (QTads), and ScummVM is GPL2 or later.

Glulx (used for modern versions of Inform) isn't listed in the release notes, but there's Glulx code in the source anyway.

> - it won't load any zcode games distributed in the modern '.gblorb' format,

That's Glulxe, not ZCode. It's the z-machine extended for 32 bit.

>640x480, is... well, it sure is an accurate emulation of the experience of playing a text adventure

Not so much, every interpreter in the 90's could change the colours perfectly. Also, the resolution didn't matter, as every game was tought for an 80x24 terminal.

Frotz for DOS had color switches so you could use a b/w setup perfectly.

I am mostly comparing the experience ScummVM offers for a text game to what something like Lectrote offers: a window sitting in your operating system, with text rendered at the native resolution of your screen by the OS's text system, versus a bunch of text routines spewing a 1-bit unantialiased font directly into an unresizable frame-buffer designed around upscaling graphical games of the nineties to modern screens.

For instance, here is the first screenful of Plotkin's So Far in ScummVM 2.2.0 and Lectrote 1.3.4: https://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/So-...

Lectrote works on top of Chromium/Electron and thus leaves a lot to be desired. At least for macOS, there's no reason to compromise in this way when there exist interpreters that take full advantage of the system.

Spatterlight is a native Cocoa application with superior typography, better performance and orders of magnitude less bloat:

http://ccxvii.net/spatterlight/

And for Magnetic Scrolls games, there's the amazing magnetiX:

http://maczentrisch.de/magnetiX/

Surely the performance left on the table by going with web tech instead of native code is just academic for a text adventure?

Besides using 6x more memory (close to 500MB for my target game) and taking 3x to load, latency is noticeably worse to the point of it becoming a major annoyance during play.

Typing feels sluggish and there's obvious delay after hitting ENTER and waiting for input to be processed and results to be displayed.

Spatterlight feels instant. Are these annoyances academic? Not for me.

I mean, nfrotz/frotz had it better than Scummvm.

You could disable the blue background in frotz under DOS,

and in the 90's everyone had Winfrotz available.

On Linux, XTerm/RXVT/ATerm with every font/colour or the bare tty running frotz too, far more readable than that eye soring blue.

There are plenty of text adv emus before scumm or dosbox even exists.

This. You could run frotz/xzip far before DOSBox existed.

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