Episode: 2473
Title: HPR2473: Frotz - A Portable Z-Machine Interpreter
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2473/hpr2473.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:46:35

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This is HPR episode 2473 entitled, Flots, A Portable Net Machine Interpreter.
It is posted by Claudia Omeranda and in about 10 minutes long, and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is how to use Flots to play those old info context adventure games from the HATES.
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Happy New Year, Hacker Public Radio. This is Claudio M with my first recording for 2018.
This is me making good on my New Year's resolution to record more episodes for Hacker Public Radio.
So this is the first of hopefully many more that I'll be sending over to Ken Fallon.
Anyway, today's episode is about a piece of software called Frots that spelled
box trot Romeo Oscar Tango Zulu. What is Frots you may be asking? Frots is an interpreter for
Infocom games and other z-machine games. Now, what's an Infocom game? Infocom games are those
text adventure games by a company called Infocom, which was around during the 80s,
and basically all they did was make a bunch of text adventure games. If you remember back
when I recorded my previous episode, I had discussed the text adventure game called Adventure,
known by its full name Colossal Cave Adventure, which was a game that was developed in the early 70s,
and eventually became part of the BSD Games package, which you'll find numerous Linux
distributions and BSD flavors, and you can install and play it. So I had in that episode I talked
about my experience with it, and I mentioned I would be doing an episode on Frots, and how it can
run other games like Zork, which are similar text adventure games. So yes, Frots is an interpreter
for these types of games that allows you to run these games, which were originally meant for
for DOS machines back in the day in the 80s and 90s. But this allows you to bypass
the having to, I mean, you can run it on DOS box if you wanted to, but this way you can actually run
it directly through your Linux or BSD or Illumos or whatever open source Unix-like operating system
you're running. And I believe they actually have a Windows version. You can check it out. The
website is frots.sourceforge.net, and you can download the source code there. It's actually
distributed by the GPL under the GPL. Yeah, and there's different ports. There's actually one
for Windows, one for the iPhone. There's actually an Infocomplean botfire, so you call Group,
and one for Palm OS machines, so there you go. Yeah, and they have a GitHub page as well,
so you can see all that information on the website. But if you are running a Linux distribution,
first and foremost, before you go about downloading source code, check there. Check in your
respective package manager for your Linux distribution or your package manager for your BSD
flavor, or what have you, and see if it's available there. Currently, I'm running on this laptop,
I'm running for door 27, so I would do sudo DNF search frots. And I already have installed,
I'll provide my password, and it'll show me that it's already there. So it shows up as frots.x8664.
So if you're running for door, install sudo DNF install frots, or if you're running some
other Linux distribution, you can install it by whatever means they use. Once you have it installed,
you're going to wonder how you're going to play any one of these games. Well, you have to find the
games. I managed to find a website that has the zork trilogy available for free. Now granted,
I don't know what the status of the licensing for these games is, if it was public domain,
if it was, if it's just considered abandoned, but that I will leave up to you. A quick search,
you can do a search for download zork, and it should be the first hit. As a matter of fact,
I think even it shows the second hit off of Google shows zork one available for free download
on archive.org. So I went with the first one, the first website listed, so you can go with that.
The first website that I went to, which has the downloads, they are, they make available the
DOS version and the classic macOS versions, but I recommend that you download the DOS version,
as the files will probably be more compatible. I haven't tried it with the mac version,
I didn't see me too, so I went with the DOS version. So on the website that I went to,
it's, they have the zipped file for zork, so I'll give an example of how to do it with zork one,
since that's available on archive.org, you can find it there. Once you download it,
what you want to do is uncompress it. Now you can open a terminal, navigate to that
location, where the unzip files are, and what you want to look for is the zork one.dat file.
Now that will actually be in a data folder in the uncompressed location, okay? So navigate
yourself through the terminal into that directory, and once you're in that directory,
you can type frots, and then the name of the dat file. So I have my file uncompressed,
I'm going to move over to the directory. So mine is in slash home slash
clodium slash downloads slash zork hyphen trilogy slash zork one, because that's where I uncompressed it.
So zork one, it was saved as zork one.zip, zork one was the directory that I ended up with
after I uncompressed it. So I'm currently in the zork one directory, so I see the files,
there's a bunch of old dots files, so nnnnc.com, reading.txt, set up.inf.
We don't need to worry about that. What we want to do is we want to type frots,
and then there's a datapolder, it's all caps, so it's all, okay, sensitive, data slash zork one.dat.
I'm doing it from the root of that uncompressed directory, but you can dive into the data directory
and then run it from there if you'd like. Now the reason why I'm doing it at the root is because
when I want to save a game, it will save it in the directory that I launched frots front.
Okay, so once I do that, I have frots, space, data slash zork one.dat, hit enter,
and lo and behold, I am now in the game of zork one, the great underground empire.
And it's telling me, I'm west of house, you are standing in an open field west of a
white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. Now, if you remember in
adventure, when I typed x, y, z, y, something happened, I'm going to do that right here, x, y, z,
y. A hollow voice says full. So yeah, there's a lot of references here with the original adventure
game. So anyone who tries to use those commands will get a humorous response. So you can also go
ahead and save the game just like in the original. So you do save and it will ask you to enter
the file name, the default is zork one.dat save, but you can say you can make the name whatever
you want it to be. Okay, so I'm just going to leave it as a default. You can also restore your
previous game by going restore, hit enter, and then says enter a file name, default is zork one.
So whatever you named it, just pull that name up, that file up, or just pull up the original
one that was there, and we'll bring you back to where you were. Now, to quit the game,
cue, very simple. You wish to leave the game. Yes, hit any key to exit, and you're back at
the terminal point. So very simple, straightforward, doesn't it? I think the only amount of work that
you'll have is uncompressing, finding the files and uncompressing them. These should work for
other infocom games. I know there's a bunch of other similar style text adventure games. You'll
have to test them out yourself, but the process is pretty much the same. If you just type
frauds and hit enter, you'll get a list of options. So you can enable sound, disable color,
ultra piracy opcode. There's a bunch of different options here. Anything you can always check
the man page for that and do man frauds and get some more information from there.
Anyway, this has been Claudio M discussing frauds. We'll see what else I can bring down the pike
as I work on my keeping my new year's resolution. Anyway, I hope we've enjoyed this episode.
Have some fun with frauds. Find yourself a good old text adventure game and relive those
childhood memories of playing these style games. Bye bye.
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