Interpreters

Someone looking to play a Hugo game has several choices of interpreter:

  1. Hugo_engine- As the official Hugo interpreter, in many cases, this is what is encouraged among players. Unfortunately, Mac and Linux players often have trouble getting it set up, and movies no longer work under Windows 7.
  2. Hugor- Newcomer to the scene, interpreter Hugor is a godsend to Mac and Linux players- and makes some nice design decisions to boot. For one thing, music is muted, not paused, when the screen is minimized, allowing authors to know exactly when songs will end. It doesn’t play movies, but as far as Windows 7 is concerned, it also means the program won’t hang.
  3. Gargoyle- A popular glk-based “multi-interpreter”.

There are several other interpreters (of course, even the Debugger can be used as an interpreter), but those three are the most popular. Just the same, some others-

  1. Hugo winglk- There are some (well, at least one) official Hugo glk interpreters. It is an okay way to test glk functionality, but it was last updated years ago and could be very misleading. Using something like Gargoyle is recommended instead.
  2. Zoom- Mac and Linux players also have the multi-interpreter Zoom available to them. It doesn’t support graphics and such but is likely a decent choice for non-multimedia games.
  3. ggzc (“the poor man’s interactive fiction player”)- This bare-bones Linux interpreter may be a good way to check out how a game looks in a cheapglk interpreter.
  4. IFP- Some kind of Linux multi-interpreter.