Hi all!
I'm the creator of WinAGI. After the last release in 2007, I've been completely away from the AGI scene (RL sent me in a different direction). I've recently found interest in AGI again, and more specifically WinAGI, and have dusted off the dev files to see where I left off. A number of issues that were reported in the last release (1.1.22) I believe are fixed. And I have added a few more things to an update that's pretty much ready to release.
While I was creating WinAGI, I spent a lot of time disassembling the original AGI interpreters; if y'all have questions about the interpreters, I may have already found the answer for you. And there are some things that are still in the AGI spec files that are wrong (which WinAGI [and it's help files] have right, for example, the algorithm for drawing lines in PIC resources, the definition of splatter codes, the function of reserved flag f11[it's set if a particular platform supports the noise channel - it's not 'logic0 is run for first time']). I also learned a lot about commands, and how the interpreter handles data passed to them which would be really useful for game developers to know and included that in the WinAGI Help file). I may try to upload what I've learned to the Wiki, but only if moderators are cool with it.
I am not an IT guy in my day job dev and programming have always been just a hobby for me. I knew enough to be dangerous 10-15 years ago, but I have never been able to keep up- most of the dev world has blown by me. I can do simple java scripts, and I've played around with some of Microsoft's latest Visual Studio dev environments (I created a simple phone app that solved a collectible card puzzle game just to see if I could do it), but I'm woefully ignorant of most modern dev tools. My expertise is VBA for Office and VB6 so I tend to stick with what's familiar. With the kids grown up and out of the house now, maybe I'll have more time to learn about all these other tools, and I might even try to port WinAGI to a more modern environment.
I know there's not a lot of love for VB6 and programs created in it, but it's an incredibly resilient programming environment that has worked extremely well even as Windows has gone through many major revisions. (I'm running VB6 on Windows 10 with no issues at all, and WinAGI runs perfectly on my Windows 10 Surface Pro.) And I also know that Windows doesn't seem to the OS of choice for a lot of AGI aficionados. So maybe a Windows based app developed in VB6 is not the most sought after AGI tool.
But I really hope that people won't discount WinAGI just because of the dev tool used to create it. If you are looking to create a full featured AGI game, I submit that there is no better tool than WinAGI; it's not just a resource editor - it has built in tools that allow you to manage creation of your game from start to finish. And it also has the best editors for ALL agi resources, IMHO.
The VB syntax that I included in WinAGI seems to have been a huge turnoff for many, and caused confusion for many more. I think for my next release, I'll hide that feature so only the original Sierra programming language is shown/discussed. (I'll leave it there as an undocumented feature for myself and anyone else who doesn't believe that VB is the spawn of the devil).
I will probably issue a new release by end of the month, but if anyone has anything in particular that they like/don't like about WinAGI, I'll entertain requests, recognizing that time constraints to make code changes are the biggest factor. And if you have any WinAGI questions, message me or post in the forums.