Frotz

Frotz
Status:	Under development
Version:	1
Base:	No
Source:	included in the .xo bundle
l10n:	missing
Contributors
Josh Minor

Frotz

Frotz.activity lets you play interactive fiction games on your XO laptop. This activity is a wrapper around the Unix port of Frotz, which is an interpreter for Infocom games and other Z-machine games. It includes one game, the classic Adventure. You can download more games here: Frotz/Games.

Instructions

How to install

Download this .xo file from the Browse activity: Frotz-1.xo

If you have an older version, you'll need to delete it before you can download the new version. There are instructions here: Activity_Upgrade

How to play

Use the keyboard to type commands like "look" and "take key". Most games respond to the word "help" with some instructions. See also: http://www.microheaven.com/IFGuide/

You can usually use "save" and "restore" to avoid losing your progress. Unfortunately the Keep button on the toolbar does *not* save your progress.

If you download z-machine files from the Internet (most end with .z5) then you can open them from the Journal to make Frotz play them.

How to develop

Frotz.activity is free software, licensed under the GPL and so is the actual frotz interpreter. You can find the source code to the wrapper inside the .xo bundle. Source for the interpreter can be found on David Griffith's website: http://frotz.homeunix.org/frotz/

If you are interested in a python z-machine implementation see: http://code.google.com/p/zvm/

Release Notes

• v1

First public release. Includes frotz v2.43

Testing

v1 has been tested on build 690 under emulation as well as on a G1G1 running 691.

Reviews

See Talk:Frotz

Bugs

• The Keep button doesn't save your progress.

Feature requests

• Ideally this would incorporate Inform, so you could write interactive fiction as well as play it.