What would it take to port an Infocom/Z-machine interpreter to PocketBook eReaders

[kakonema]

Originally Posted by wold

Way back Pocketbook organized an app development challenge of sorts. IIRC an Z-interpreter was a honorable mention, but I can't find the page anymore. It looked basic and probably came without its source anyway.

See also this Frotz for Kobo thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...42#post2711142

You mean this page?
https://pocketbook-free.sourceforge.net/en/index.shtml

[eline]

I am interested in this idea, because I've wanted to play IF on an e-ink screen for years.

I'm looking into what it would take to make a KOReader plugin.

[wold]

Originally Posted by kakonema

You mean this page?
https://pocketbook-free.sourceforge.net/en/index.shtml

Yes, the page was mentioned earlier.

That app is actually for a different format called QSP: https://www.ifwiki.org/QSP

Quest Soft Player is a text-based game developing system leaning towards the choice-based interface (there is an option to make a parser game). It includes a cross-platform player and a couple of utilities for game development.

Originally developed by Valeriy "Byte" Argunov, it has a big and stable Russian community.

[Biep]

Hi!
Any progress?
I'd *love* to have Gargoyle on my PocketBook Era. I used to have Frotz on my Kobo Aura One (R.I.P.), which allowed me to play basic games, but Gargoyle offers so much more!

Thanks for working on this!

P.S.: The list of third-party software on my PocketBook Era incluides QT 5.

[orontee]

Last version of the SDK includes Qt (see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=361705), so now it should be possible to build Qt applications. (@Biep Qt5 libraries being installed on devices is not sufficient to build an application that depends on Qt5; It's only a requirement. In previous versions of the SDK, the build stuff for Qt apps was missing).

I thus decided to give up writing a pure "Inkview" front-end based and started to work on a mostly unchanged build of Gargoyle.

Detailed instructions to cross-compile garglk dependencies and try to build garglk itself are available in gargoyle-pocketbook-port Github project.

For dependencies it now looks good. But the built gargoyle contains hard-coded paths, the path to fonts and the path to interpreter. So at present time it fails to run any interpreter.

Remarks

• Sound support is disabled at build time since it adds a dependency on SDL2
• No idea what keyboard support we'll have once the paths are fixed...
• My knowledge of CMake is limited, and fixing the hard-coded paths problem is certainly trivial if one uses CMake procedure to install the application
• Harfbuzz and Freetype2 are complex libraries so don't expect things to work seamlessly after the hard-coded paths are fixed

[diegoocampo]

So great to see @orontee taking over this project. It was soon clear to me that without having previous experience with C/C++ development it was going to be a big project for me to even get started.

Maybe a separate thread to follow up with the progress on your Gargoyle for Pocketbook port would be good so people can see that there is clearly something on the works now?

[Biep]

Thanks for working on it! Don't expect any coding from me, but I am willing to help test anything you want (if it won't brick my Era or erase my stuff ��).

[orontee]

Compilation is almost good. I started the application and loaded a Z5 story. I am stuck after few screens since there's no onscreen keyboard.





Note that I tried to load a glorb file; Crash...

More positive, note that thanks to Harfbuzz the text rendering is very nice compared to the console rendering I first achieved with Frotz (cf. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/at...6&d=1704664918).

Given the Qt file chooser is really ugly, the screen isn't recognized with correct resolution and there's no onscreen keyboard, and I am not a Qt lover, I see no reason to keep using Qt. So I'll switch back porting gargoyle with my own UI based on Inkview SDK.

Be patient!

[diegoocampo]

Thanks for the update and those first screenshots of Gargoyle in a Pocketbook! that seems like great progress. An UI using Inkview will surely look cleaner. Looking forward to the next update.

[Biep]

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(If that doesn't show - it's applause.)
Thanks for the work you are putting in it!

[Biep]

Is there any other group programming for the PocketBook? They might have valuable knowledge.
I only know of KOReader, but they are not too focused on PocketBook as opposed to some other brands.