An interactive fiction player
Gargoyle is an IF player that supports all the major interactive fiction formats.
Most interactive fiction is distributed as portable game files. These portable game files come in many formats. In the past, you used to have to download a separate player (interpreter) for each format of IF you wanted to play.
Gargoyle is based on the standard interpreters for the formats it supports. Gargoyle is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Typography in interactive fiction
Gargoyle cares about typography! In this computer age of typographical poverty, where horrible fonts, dazzling colors, and inadequate white space is God, Gargoyle dares to rebel!
The default font for Gargoyle is Bitstream Charter and Luxi Mono. Two vastly underrated fonts that I find just perfect for screen reading. They are included, so there is no need to install anything on your system.
Gargoyle does not use any operating system functions for drawing text, so it can use any TrueType, OpenType or Postscript font file you specify in the configuration file.
Many many formats
There are many interpreters that have been Glk-enabled. All of the following interpreters have been compiled for Gargoyle and are included in the package:
Agility 1.1.1, Alan 2.8.6 and 3.0a1, Frotz 2.43 (glk port), Glulxe 0.3.5, Hugo 3.1, Level 9 4.0, Magnetic 2.2, Scare 1.3.3, Tads 2.5.10 and 3.0.12.
These interpreters are freely distributable, but are still copyrighted by their authors and covered by their own licenses.
Download and installation
The files can also be found on the IF Archive in the interpreters-multi section.
On Windows: download the windows installer and run. On Linux/x86: download the linux package, untar and run. If you are using another unix, or the binary package doesn't work for you, download the source package, unzip and use jam to compile.
A brief manual
The main program gargoyle is a front-end that detects the file type and launches the correct player program. On windows you can drag-n-drop the game files onto the player exe-files. Each player can take its usual (non-gargoyle) options, if started from the command shell.
A [more] prompt will appear when more text than fits is shown. This is the scrollback mode. You can use arrows and page up/down to scroll the text. Hit the page up key to get back into scrollback mode at any time.
Some Glk apps use more than one area that you can type text into. Use Tab or click to change which one has the keyboard focus.
Gargoyle will look for configuration files and load them in this order. Later settings override earlier settings:
tor@ccxvii.net
