intfiction.org

Ok thanks. I just tested it and the Grotesque software recognizes it as an Adrift file.

Now, back to the original concern. Grotesque chooses which interpreter to use based off of which format the story is in, not based off its extension. If someone would prefer to use a different interpreter for each version of Adrift, for example, it still is no problem to create three formats, say, adrift3, adrift4, and adrift5, assign whatever extensions they want to them and their respective interpreters. Then, when stories are imported, they would have to manually change the story format to use whichever interpreter they prefer. There's really no way for me to automate this.

If the user imports a file that can't have its Treaty of Babel info read, and it has an extension which is shared by multiple formats, then it will just have to default to "Unknown" for its format.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

The way Grotesque is set up, you shouldn't have to change the extensions. You can just work with the formats, which are only stored in Grotesque's library and do not affect your files.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

You could always do what Microsoft do when opening a *.sln file. It opens with "Microsoft Visual Studio Version Selector" which analyzes the file, then sends to the relevant executable. In the case of a Blorb it should be easy enough to analyze it to grab the Executable format, then process as appropriate.

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ADRIFT Developer developer.

To jakobcreutzfeldt: Yeah, I know, I was just thinking aloud about my file associations regardless of Grotesque.

Incidently, as long as I'm here, I had a thought... it would be aces if you could allow ".lnk" files (shortcuts) to be added to the list and executed normally. You see, my new Windows doesn't seem to run any DOS-based IF by itself, so I use Dosbox and D-Fend to create shortcuts I can just double-click to play. If I can't put those shortcuts in Grotesque, I can't really add DOS-games to the library.

By the way, you said:



What if the emulator works more like:

"C:\Interactive Fiction\Tools and Interpreters\AppleWin\Applewin.exe",1

That extra "1" in there. I know very little about these things, but some of my programs don't load properly on double-clicking the file unless there's that "1" or maybe "%1" after the filename, as a parametre. Would this be an inconvenience?

This is more or less what's happening. If you open a .blorb file, it checks the format and opens the appropriate interpreter. Since I've (just now) determined that it's correctly extracting the format to be Adrift or Glulx or whatever from .blorb files (to continue the example), it will always choose the interpreter that you set for those formats.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

Cool.

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ADRIFT Developer developer.

I'm not sure how trivial this is; I'll have to look. But in the case of Dosbox, you can just set the interpreter as dosbox (or the full path to the dosbox executable) and then import the .exe games as normal. When Grotesque launches them, it will correctly handle sending the game to Dosbox. This, at least, is working fine on my system. I'd love for you to try it on 0.9.2 to let me know how it works. The shortcuts shouldn't be necessary...



I haven't used AppleWin before. How do you typically use it? Do you start the application and then from within the application, select and open a game to run? If this is the only way to do things, there's no way for Grotesque to launch AppleWin and tell it which game to run. If you're comfortable with a DOS-like interface, you can launch the Windows command prompt (in the start menu, type cmd.exe in the search box), navigate to C:\Interactive Fiction\Tools and Interpreters\AppleWin\ and then type Applewin.exe followed by a path to a game for which you would normally require this emulator, and hit enter to try to launch it. If that works, then yes, you can use it in Grotesque by setting the interpreter as that full path (no 1 or %1 needed).

After I finish 0.9.2, we can give it a try.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

Re applewin: ah, too bad, it just loads up the program. See, that's one of the reasons I would sometimes prefer to let Windows handle that sort of thing... would it be too much of a hassle to make it toggleable, or something? Or do "Unknown" file-types default to allowing the OS to do whatever it thinks best? Because in that case I might just leave these files as "Unknown" and be the happier for it.

Re DOSBOX: I can do it like that, I suppose... I just like the D-Fend way of doing things... but if Grotesque were to just assume it as "Unknown" and allow the OS to run it normally, then it would work well enough, I suppose...

I hope I'm not being too much of a pain - you're doing a wonderful job.

You're not being a pain, you're helping me make Grotesque the best program possible! Ok, ok, the best program with some bugs here and there, but good nonetheless.

Re: AppleWin, that's a shame. But...When we get 0.9.2 up and running (I think I've finished the GTK3 one, then I have to port to GTK2, then I have to build the Windows version), we'll try it anyway following what I've done for getting Dosbox to work:

So the best practice now would be to first set up your interpreters, and then import your library. So, in addition to the default formats supported by Grotesque, I added a format called "dos" (no quotes). In the interpreter, I set it as "dosbox" (which my system knows means the application; I could have also provided the full path). For extensions, I put "exe,bat", since DOS games are usually either executables or batch files.

Next, I imported a folder which contains the original Zork. When importing a folder or individual files, Grotesque now knows to also look for *.exe and *.bat files. It found two .exes, in the Zork folder but it couldn't extract ToB info from them so it drops me into edit mode. The first .exe was some other utility and not a game, so I hit 'Cancel', which skips it. For the actual zork.exe, Grotesque saw the .exe extension and, since no other formats use .exe, it figured that it must be a "dos" format game. If you click the big play button in the edit dialog, it launches Dosbox and Zork starts up right away. I went on IFDB, found the IFID for Zork and entered it in the field, hit the search button and the rest of the metadata was automagically filled.

So now, all .exe files are automatically recognized as Dosbox games. If it were a blorb and Grotesque can't extract the metadata, though, the format would be unknown, because it can't figure it out just from the extension.

Incidentally, I realized that ever since the original 0.2.1 code that I inherited, TADS3 games were being ignored (it wasn't looking for the .t3 extension)! So that's fixed too!

I think with this version, it will be much more stable and I can focus on smoothing out whatever rough edges and filling whatever holes remain.

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

It seem an ideal way of going about it.