ScummVM has a little Hugo support

This is a discussion / support forum for the Hugo programming language by Kent Tessman. Hugo is a powerful programming language for making text games / interactive fiction with multimedia support.

Hugo download links: https://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo
Roody Yogurt's Hugo Blog: https://notdeadhugo.blogspot.com
The Hugor interpreter by RealNC: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Hugor

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

More later but you need a development build here: https://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html
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Roody_Yogurt
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Roody_Yogurt »

Ah, cool. I had noticed that they were basically working off gargoyle (or possibly just glk) ever since they added z-code support, but they have been so slow in adding support for the others, I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen.

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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Roody_Yogurt wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:36 pm Ah, cool. I had noticed that they were basically working off gargoyle (or possibly just glk) ever since they added z-code support, but they have been so slow in adding support for the others, I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen.
It ain't great. The graphic didn't show when I tried Enceladus but I thought I put code in to check to see if it was a graphics-supporting terp or not. And then I typed "help" and ScummVM took that command over and didn't send it to the game. :(

BUT I know it's a work in progress, so. (And all of the other implementations for the graphics-based games are great.)
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Tdarcos
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Tdarcos »

Sometimes there is a problem in new systems supporting older ones, how do you allow people to use new features under an older environment?

This was a problem in hardware going back to how it was documented in Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine when Dtat General was developing a 32-bit version of their Nova mnicomputer, to compete with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX Mainframe, which is also a 32-bit machine.

Someone wanted to add a "Mode bit," which if toggled would enable 32-bit mode. A simple fix, but the company president, Edson DaCastro, vetoed. DaCastro, who quit DEC to found Data General and had seen some bad choices made there, didn't want to add a mode bit, because when you get kludges added to fix a problem, they end to spread elsewhere.

ScummVM is one of two systems most likely, not having looked at the source code: (1) a multiple interpreter including separate execution modules for each game type; or more likely (2) a 'meta interpreter' which takes the code of that particular game, uses a custom "switcher" for that game's instructions, acquires the particular locations which will have data for those instructions, then passes these arguments to the execution module for that function. In the case of the latter, the effectiveness of the interpreter is directly related to how well it maps the functions of the original interpreter to its own functions.
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Jizaboz »

Tdarcos wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2020 8:22 pm Sometimes there is a problem in new systems supporting older ones, how do you allow people to use new features under an older environment?

This was a problem in hardware going back to how it was documented in Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine when Dtat General was developing a 32-bit version of their Nova mnicomputer, to compete with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX Mainframe, which is also a 32-bit machine.

Someone wanted to add a "Mode bit," which if toggled would enable 32-bit mode. A simple fix, but the company president, Edson DaCastro, vetoed. DaCastro, who quit DEC to found Data General and had seen some bad choices made there, didn't want to add a mode bit, because when you get kludges added to fix a problem, they end to spread elsewhere.

ScummVM is one of two systems most likely, not having looked at the source code: (1) a multiple interpreter including separate execution modules for each game type; or more likely (2) a 'meta interpreter' which takes the code of that particular game, uses a custom "switcher" for that game's instructions, acquires the particular locations which will have data for those instructions, then passes these arguments to the execution module for that function. In the case of the latter, the effectiveness of the interpreter is directly related to how well it maps the functions of the original interpreter to its own functions.
I think it is more number 1. This system originally was meant to only run LucasArts games like The Secret of Monkey Island smoothly on multiple devices.

As years went on they piled on old Sierra game support and then many other games. I was a it surprised they added text game support as I always viewed ScummVM as a graphic adventure modern loader.
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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Tdarcos wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2020 8:22 pm ScummVM is one of two systems most likely, not having looked at the source code: (1) a multiple interpreter including separate execution modules for each game type; or more likely (2) a 'meta interpreter' which takes the code of that particular game, uses a custom "switcher" for that game's instructions
So your analysis is that there is either one interpreter or more than one?
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Roody_Yogurt »

One of the many victims of 2020 was my almost-religious habit of checking ScummVM updates- of course, not very important compared to many of the other events of 2020, but I thought to check it for the first time in months today and had a, "whoa, it has been a while" moment.

Interestingly (to people like us), daily builds these days support some of the Penguin/Polarware games which I guess used an engine they called Comprehend. I gave it a spin today, and it's kind of neat- it displays the graphics as one would want (I only tried it with the DOS version; it's possible it doesn't work with anything else), but all of the text is displayed with the glk-using crisp goodness that we enjoy these days.

It's surprising but kind of cool that ScummVM could very well become the best interpreter for playing certain text games.

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Angry Stewart Payne
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Re: ScummVM has a little Hugo support

Post by Angry Stewart Payne »

Came here to ask about this but had some notifications I had to deal with.

Did anyone get this to work?

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