Tutorial: How to add support for a new story format
Out-of-the-box, Grotesque supports zcode, TADS2, TADS3, ADRIFT, and Glulx stories. Of course, there are many more formats out there than just these. Fortunately, it's easy to add support for other formats in Grotesque. In this tutorial, we'll add support for old DOS games using DOSBox to launch them.
1) First, we need to let Grotesque know about the DOS format. Click the Preferences button and switch to the Interpreters tab. Click the Add button. In the dialog that pops up, we have three fields to fill out. The first one is the format, which we will use to identify games. Type in "dos" (without the quotes). In the next field, we enter the extensions of files of this game format. Most DOS games have either .exe or .bat as their extension. Enter "exe,bat" (again without the quotes). But, don't worry. If you put spaces in there, or you include the leading ".", Grotesque will clean it up and put it in the format that it wants. Finally, we need to specfy DOSBox as our interpreter. We can click the Open button to try to find it on our filesystem, but say we know that it exists at "/usr/bin/dosbox", so we can just type it in directly. Click "OK" to finish and close the Preferences dialog
2) Let's say you store all of your DOS games in one folder. We'll import it by clicking the button with the folder on it, finding the folder and clicking OK. Since we told Grotesque that we expect some of our games to have .exe or .bat as their extension, it will now grab those files when it imports. However, it won't be able to extract any bibliographic information from them, so you will have to manually edit them.
3) The edit window will show the executable's name and will show that it's in the "dos" format. If you're not sure which game it is from the executable name, click the Play button on the edit dialog to launch the game and figure out what it is. Then, it's easiest to go to
http://ifdb.tads.org and search for that game. Copy the IFID listed in the game information if it has one and paste it into the appropriate field on the edit dialog. Click the Search button and the rest of the fields will be filled in (and, if there is cover art on IFDB, it will be downloaded as well). If there's no IFID, sadly you'll have to fill it in manually. Click OK when you're finished. If there are more games to edit, you will move on to the next one, otherwise you're finished and you can play them now! Since .exe files are common and not all of them are IF games, if Grotesque tries to import some non-IF one, just hit cancel on the edit dialog and it'll skip it.
Please note that this will only work if your interpreter can launch a game from the command line. If you can only open games from within the interpreter's own graphical user interface, Grotesque won't be able to work with it.
If you need help with anything, let me know!
_________________
Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
Members
If I do it, that'll come at a much later time.
Things look a log uglier in D-Fend, but I can now load it from Grotesque, so it's perfectly ok.
)