A Gargoyle question

In my efforts over the years to crack open the nut of compiled game files and extract their sweet copy, largely in quixotic hopes to “port” CYOA games written in IF languages to plain HTML, I’ve found Gargoyle indispensable at granting me copy and paste privileges until it abruptly stops doing so, subsequent pastes just yielding blank spaces. Other applications can still paste, but even when Gargoyle is shut down and re-opened it still won’t allow repasting its selected and copied content until Windows is rebooted.

I don’t expect that anyone here knows why that would be, or even that it happens (my use pattern is admittedly quite aberrant) but I thought I’d just inquire. Perhaps it is a deliberate move to limit the amount of a game’s text that can be siphoned out through the interpreter?

I don’t know Windows, but I know Gargoyle isn’t doing that.

Why not use the “transcript” command and copy and paste from the transcript?

Interferes with attempts to convert-as-I-go and requires a very disciplined, hierarchical play style for the transcript to make much sense afterward, but otherwise a gold standard for gathering my data! I don’t know how I missed your excellent suggestion previously, but I’m glad I checked back in.

there are better tools to extract/dump game contents: inform-fiction.org/zmachine/ztools.html

That will prove to be hugely useful in the case of a subset of the games whose guts I’m trying to spill wide open! I don’t know why, but a disproportionally large amount of them appear to be written in TADS or ADRIFT. Any idea if similar tools are available for those languages?

ADRIFT modules are just XML, so you could use XSLT to transform them into whatever you want.

The ztools package is great for looking through strings in a Z-code game, but it doesn’t give you a sense of how sentences and paragraphs fit together in a gameplay session. For that, you need a transcript.

All right, Ztools helped me to ferret out the single different-the-second-time element from Jonas Kyratzes’ The Great Machine; in the meantime, I’ve upgraded Gargoyle, thinking that it might help with my problem, and now find that it won’t copy anything for pasting, ever!

Furthermore, I can’t figure out how to make it produce transcripts for non-Z-code games. This is putting a real crimp into my stalled conversion of The Ascot 8) While I don’t /understand/ Campbell Wild’s comment above, I will have to take a crack at figuring it out.