I’ve talked about my travails using Subversion and getting unit testing set up. I was mysteriously vague about what it was all for…
…Until now. (Cue ominous music!)
It’s for an application called Neutrino, which will allow you to do something on a new Mac 1-2 years from now that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.
Word by Word
Neutrino is a TADS multimedia interpreter written in Cocoa using Xcode. Let’s break that down:
TADS: “Text Adventure Development System,” a special-purpose programming language, library, and virtual machine for both writing and playing interactive fiction a.k.a. text adventure games. Wikipedia has some history on it.
multimedia: When TADS was first introduced, it was strictly T, for textual. Its author, Michael Roberts, eventually decided to add some multimedia capabilities to it. He called it HTML-TADS, because the way to add these elements was via a simplified and customized form of HTML markup. There are only two interpreters that can fully display such content, the TADS interpreter for Windows that Michael Roberts himself wrote, and HyperTADS for the Mac, by Iain Merrick.
interpreter: TADS source code is not compiled to native CPU instructions, nor does it use specific operating system APIs. Instead, it’s compiled to be played in its own virtual machine maintained by a platform-specific interpreter, like Java source is compiled to run on a Java virtual machine.
Cocoa/Xcode: Because Neutrino is written using these technologies, I will be able to release a “universal binary” version of Neutrino, that will work on both PowerPC Macintoshes, and the Intel Macintoshes that will be released over the next several years. (Carbon/Xcode would be another possibility.)
History
For TADS’ early history, the sole Macintosh interpreter was also maintained by Michael Roberts. It used the early Toolbox TextEdit APIs, though, so it was limited to 32K of text scrollback. Plus, it didn’t display any styled text at all.
Once TADS went open source, Andrew Plotkin wrote a new interpreter for it, called MaxTADS. It had all the bells and whistles and matched in both style and name his interpreter for Z-code games, MaxZip.
When HTML-TADS arrived, HyperTADS was written to handle it, since MaxTADS remained text-only.
This all happened before OS X was released.
Current Interpreters
Today, there are three native TADS interpreters that I know of for OS X. Ben Hines did a quick-and-dirty Carbonization of MaxTADS in 2002. Recently, the more substantial ports QTads and Cugel have been released, and are under active development. I do a more thorough review of these interpreters (or at least of their UI) in this post.
So the native interpreters won’t display multimedia game content, and the one Mac multimedia interpreter is non-native and won’t run on Intel Macs.
Answer to the Riddle
If you buy a new Mac 1-2 years from now, and you want to play HTML-TADS games like Six Stories or Arrival or Exhibition to their fullest, you will be out of luck, unless I get my ass in gear and finish Neutrino.
Oh, yeah, one last note: it’s not finished yet. In fact, it’s probably about 10-25% done. But here’s a screenshot:
Weaponized Fluff 