Read Me

Grackle 0.5 beta release
by David Lodge

Grackle is a dumper and play for adventures written using the Graphics Adventure
toolkit. At the moment it supports games from the following systems:
* Spectrum (in .sna format)
* CPC (as extracted files with the AMSDOS header from a disk image or as a .sna)
* BBC Micro (as the raw datafile extracted from the disc image, usually called
$.DATA)
* C64 (as a .vsf snapshot, e.g. as saved from the vice emulator)

Both of these are the runnable versions of the files, rather than the raw data
files. The BBC Micro datafile works both in the native interpreter and runner.

The command line format is:
	grackle <adventure file> [dump]

If you specify "dump" as the second parameter then the adventure database will
be dumped and it will not try to play through it. If this is missing it will try
to play the adventure.

You'll probably want to save the dump to a file, this can easily be done via
the > output operator (in both Linux and Windows), see the last example below.

For example:
	grackle "Winter Wonderland.sna"
	grackle ransom.sna dump
	grackle 12lost
	grackle $.DATA >ransom.txt

The are probably lots of bugs, if you find issues, please report them using the
sourceforge tracker for grackle at:
	http://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?group_id=243114

Current LOAD, SAVE and wait for a key press are unsupported.

grackle-draw.c is included in this version, this is my basic messing code to
redraw the graphics on the BBC Micro from the graphics data file (usually
$.GDATA). The BBC Micro used a different format than other platforms. The image
drawing code is very basic and there will be errors in the output.

The C64 is hacky at best, so there will be bugs.

In the archive are the source code and DOS executable (command line only). The
code can be compiled on other systems (and has been written and tested on Linux)
by using:
	gcc -o grackle grackle-play.c