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I am mostly comparing the experience ScummVM offers for a text game to what something like Lectrote offers: a window sitting in your operating system, with text

I am mostly comparing the experience ScummVM offers for a text game to what something like Lectrote offers: a window sitting in your operating system, with text rendered at the native resolution of your screen by the OS's text system, versus a bunch of text routines spewing a 1-bit unantialiased font directly into an unresizable frame-buffer designed around upscaling graphical games of the nineties to modern screens. For instance, here is the first screenful of Plotkin's So Far in ScummVM 2.2.0 and Lectrote 1.3.4: https://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/So-Far.png https://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/So-...

metroholografix 6y ago
Lectrote works on top of Chromium/Electron and thus leaves a lot to be desired. At least for macOS, there's no reason to compromise in this way when there exist interpreters that take full advantage of the system. Spatterlight is a native Cocoa application with superior typography, better performance and orders of magnitude less bloat: http://ccxvii.net/spatterlight/ http://ccxvii.net/spatterlight/ And for Magnetic Scrolls games, there's the amazing magnetiX: http://maczentrisch.de/magnetiX/ http://maczentrisch.de/magnetiX/
- p1necone 6y ago
  Surely the performance left on the table by going with web tech instead of native code is just academic for a text adventure?
  - metroholografix 6y ago
    Besides using 6x more memory (close to 500MB for my target game) and taking 3x to load, latency is noticeably worse to the point of it becoming a major annoyance during play. Typing feels sluggish and there's obvious delay after hitting ENTER and waiting for input to be processed and results to be displayed. Spatterlight feels instant. Are these annoyances academic? Not for me.
anthk 6y ago
I mean, nfrotz/frotz had it better than Scummvm. You could disable the blue background in frotz under DOS, and in the 90's everyone had Winfrotz available. On Linux, XTerm/RXVT/ATerm with every font/colour or the bare tty running frotz too, far more readable than that eye soring blue.

metroholografix 6y ago

Lectrote works on top of Chromium/Electron and thus leaves a lot to be desired. At least for macOS, there's no reason to compromise in this way when there exist interpreters that take full advantage of the system. Spatterlight is a native Cocoa application with superior typography, better performance and orders of magnitude less bloat: http://ccxvii.net/spatterlight/ http://ccxvii.net/spatterlight/ And for Magnetic Scrolls games, there's the amazing magnetiX: http://maczentrisch.de/magnetiX/ http://maczentrisch.de/magnetiX/

p1necone 6y ago
Surely the performance left on the table by going with web tech instead of native code is just academic for a text adventure?
- metroholografix 6y ago
  Besides using 6x more memory (close to 500MB for my target game) and taking 3x to load, latency is noticeably worse to the point of it becoming a major annoyance during play. Typing feels sluggish and there's obvious delay after hitting ENTER and waiting for input to be processed and results to be displayed. Spatterlight feels instant. Are these annoyances academic? Not for me.

anthk 6y ago

I mean, nfrotz/frotz had it better than Scummvm. You could disable the blue background in frotz under DOS, and in the 90's everyone had Winfrotz available. On Linux, XTerm/RXVT/ATerm with every font/colour or the bare tty running frotz too, far more readable than that eye soring blue.