FreeMint port of Frotz v2.44

[cb]

Here is a port of the Infocom interpreter Frotz v2.44 from https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz

This allows to play the few games that Infocom didn't release on the ST: Shogun, Journey, Zork Zero and Arthur. Those 4 games are in the archive, drag and drop them on frotz.ttp to launch them (dfrotz.ttp is a dumbed down version of frotz.ttp).

For now, it is FreeMint-only, in console with no sound. Of course, it is also compatible with the other Infocom games.

[Eero Tamminen]

Those 4 games are in the archive, drag and drop them on frotz.ttp to launch them (dfrotz.ttp is a dumbed down version of frotz.ttp).

For now, it is FreeMint-only, in console with no sound.

Thanks! When trying it in regular TOS...

"drfrotz.ttp" actually starts and kind of works, but renders screen partially wrong:

grab0001.png

That looks more like not supporting Atari VT52 properly (just VT100?), rather than requiring MiNT.

How console program can not support VT52? Even Linux programs do that...

"frotz.ttp" gives error message "Hard disk on fire" and exits. What the heck it's trying to do with hard disk?

[cb]

I'm not surprised, as Dfrotz is a very simplistic version of Frotz. Here is dfrotz readme:

Code: Select all

The dumb interface was mainly intended for those who wanted to play
Interactive Fiction, but had just a C compiler and that's it.  You get
no screen control; everything is just printed to the terminal line by
line.  The terminal handles all the scrolling.  While this can be an
annoying way to play IF, it might be the best you can do for a
particular machine, especially when the curses library is inadequate and
installing ncurses isn't an option.  It's also good for getting Frotz to
run when you have a C compiler and know nothing else of how to do
things.  This way you can run Frotz on VMS, MVS, VM/CMS and all those
other stodgy operating system.  More on that later.  Maybe you'd like to
experience what it's like to play Adventure on a teletype.

A much cooler use for compiling Frotz with the dumb interface is that it
can be wrapped in CGI scripting, PHP, and the like to allow people to
play games on webpages.  It can also be made into a chat bot.

Games that move the write little windows of text over the main body of
text are hard to read because with the dumb interface, Frotz doesn't
know how to produce inverse text.  Games that make use of timed-input
can be played, but you must manually increment the timer (see the dfrotz
manpage).  Games that move the cursor around a lot are probably
unplayable.  These include games like Andrew Plotkin's "Freefall" and
Torbjorn Andersson's "Robots".

The dumb interface code was created by Alembic Petrofsky
<alembic@petrofsky.berkeley.ca.us> in 1997 for Frotz 2.32.

And I have to say I only tested Frotz successfully on Freemint. I'll attach the sources to this post.

[cb]

Those 4 games are in the archive, drag and drop them on frotz.ttp to launch them (dfrotz.ttp is a dumbed down version of frotz.ttp).

For now, it is FreeMint-only, in console with no sound.

Thanks! When trying it in regular TOS...

"drfrotz.ttp" actually starts and kind of works, but renders screen partially wrong:
grab0001.png

That looks more like not supporting Atari VT52 properly (just VT100?), rather than requiring MiNT.

How console program can not support VT52? Even Linux programs do that...

"frotz.ttp" gives error message "Hard disk on fire" and exits. What the heck it's trying to do with hard disk?

That message is not related to the hard disk: Frotz is trying to read the HOME variable which doesn't exist under Tos. But even after commenting a couple of lines in SRC/curses/ux_init.c it will still exit with an error stating it can't open the terminal.