Happy new year, Planet IF folk.
Today I updated all of the download bundles, websites and docs for Leadlight Gamma in light of the arrival of the 2019 version of the Gargoyle IF interpreter. This means that finally, four years after I released it, Leadlight Gamma now supports text to speech on Macs the way it's always supported it on PCs, at least on MacOS 10.13+
I'm disproportionately pleased about this because I released Leadlight Gamma in 2015 with a thorough screen reader mode. It might have been the first parser game to have such a mode, though I'm not sure. At the time, I talked about issues I encountered and feedback I received at. The IFTF was recently able to investigate and report on accessibility issues in IF with the aid of a lot more empirical research.
Unfortunately, the benefits of LLG's screen reader mode couldn't be exploited on any Mac at the time of the game's release. That problem is now gone, leaving the game in the best "almost everything about it is how I wanted it to be in the first place" situation it's ever been in.
I just read Andrew Plotkin's blog post about his iOS IF interpreter framework reaching the end of its life cycle. I was thinking about similar software maintenance issues when I reviewed how all my emulation solutions for playing the original Apple II Leadlight were travelling, today.
On the PC side, everything's going great. The ActiveGS emulation kit is still pretty much a "double click the app and you're playing" solution.
On the Mac side, MacOS Catalina's arrival means the end of both the free Mac paths. ActiveGS is a 32-bit app and so is Sweet16, so both emulators are broken under Catalina. Frankly, all that's left is Virtual II. And I don't mean that Virtual II is bad — au contraire, it's a magnificent emulator of Apple IIs — but it's commercial.
I probably shouldn't be complaining. It just gives folks more reason to buy Leadlight Gamma.
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