[Scummvm-devel] Adding Frotz engine to ScummVM

[Paul Gilbert]

Hi everyone,

With the addition of the Teenagent engine to the trunk (very nice), I
decided it time for me to make my own announcement of an engine I've been
working on, and see whether it's okay to add to the ScummVM trunk.

For a long time now, I'd been working sporadically on converting the Frotz
code for interpreting Infocom games into a module that runs under ScummVM,
and I'm finally at a point where I'd like to make it public. As most of you
probably know, Infocom were pretty famous back in the early days of
adventure games for their series of text adventures. Later on, they produced
several graphic hybrid games, before being absorbed by Activision. Given
that we already have the AGI engine which supports combo text/graphics
games, I'm hoping there won't be any particular objection to also having
this engine included as well.

I've spent some time objectifying the engine, as well as separating core
ScummVM interface functionality into a generic base interpreter class, which
in theory could be used as a basis for supporting other interactive fiction
interpreters in ScummVM. As such, I call the overall engine 'Gargoyle',
after the 'Gargoyle' application, which was a distribution several years
back that included interpreters for many different authoring systems
together.

About the only thing the engine is currently missing is sound support. Two
of the Infocom games, 'The Lurking Horror' and 'Sherlock', both had a series
of sound samples. The Blorb container format, which this engine supports,
also defines an AIFF sound standard which would also be cool to support as
well.

Regards,

Paul.
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