The Infocom sound format is a strange beast, similar but not identical to the
Mac .DAT format. This means, you must convert your samples, which are
probably in another format, to the Infocom-format before inclusion in your
game.
Rick Hudson, author of the fine !SoundCon application, has been kind enough
to expand his utility to cater for such conversion. He has written a short
SoundCon module to do this. When added to SoundCon, this gives you the
chance to convert between Infocom-format samples, Audio IFF, Armadeus,
ARMovie, Sun Audio, Audioworks, Datavox, IFF/8SVX, Psion S3A, Raw data, VOC,
Voice mod, and RIFF WAVE. Currently the module only supports the Mac DAT
version Infocom-format, but this is sufficient for most purposes (indeed Zip
2000, the Acorn Standard interpreter, supports this format, and Stefan
Jokisch's Lurking Horror and Sherlock sound packages supply sounds in this
format only). Rick, however, has plans to add support for other Infocom
formats.
But where can I get this truly great package? you ask. Well, the Infocom
module, although written by Rick, is still unofficial, so is not included in
the main SoundCon application. This means you must download two archives.
(The module will probably be included in future releases of SoundCon though.)
Get thee to the FTP site micros.hensa.ac.uk, retire to the directory
/micros/arch/riscos/d/d044, there to download the file soundcon.arc. Then be
off to Germany, to that site among sites ftp.gmd.de. Go to the directory
/if-archive/betas (or if you're really quick, /incoming/if-archive) and
download the file soundcon_infmod.zip. Now unpack the SoundCon application,
and install the Infocom module, as described in its ReadMe file, and you're
away.
-- Jools Arnold jools@arnod.demon.co.uk