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Episode: 2473
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Title: HPR2473: Frotz - A Portable Z-Machine Interpreter
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2473/hpr2473.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:46:35
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---
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This is HPR episode 2473 entitled, Flots, A Portable Net Machine Interpreter.
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It is posted by Claudia Omeranda and in about 10 minutes long, and Karima Clean Flag.
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The summary is how to use Flots to play those old info context adventure games from the HATES.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Happy New Year, Hacker Public Radio. This is Claudio M with my first recording for 2018.
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This is me making good on my New Year's resolution to record more episodes for Hacker Public Radio.
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So this is the first of hopefully many more that I'll be sending over to Ken Fallon.
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Anyway, today's episode is about a piece of software called Frots that spelled
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box trot Romeo Oscar Tango Zulu. What is Frots you may be asking? Frots is an interpreter for
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Infocom games and other z-machine games. Now, what's an Infocom game? Infocom games are those
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text adventure games by a company called Infocom, which was around during the 80s,
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and basically all they did was make a bunch of text adventure games. If you remember back
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when I recorded my previous episode, I had discussed the text adventure game called Adventure,
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known by its full name Colossal Cave Adventure, which was a game that was developed in the early 70s,
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and eventually became part of the BSD Games package, which you'll find numerous Linux
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distributions and BSD flavors, and you can install and play it. So I had in that episode I talked
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about my experience with it, and I mentioned I would be doing an episode on Frots, and how it can
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run other games like Zork, which are similar text adventure games. So yes, Frots is an interpreter
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for these types of games that allows you to run these games, which were originally meant for
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for DOS machines back in the day in the 80s and 90s. But this allows you to bypass
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the having to, I mean, you can run it on DOS box if you wanted to, but this way you can actually run
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it directly through your Linux or BSD or Illumos or whatever open source Unix-like operating system
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you're running. And I believe they actually have a Windows version. You can check it out. The
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website is frots.sourceforge.net, and you can download the source code there. It's actually
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distributed by the GPL under the GPL. Yeah, and there's different ports. There's actually one
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for Windows, one for the iPhone. There's actually an Infocomplean botfire, so you call Group,
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and one for Palm OS machines, so there you go. Yeah, and they have a GitHub page as well,
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so you can see all that information on the website. But if you are running a Linux distribution,
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first and foremost, before you go about downloading source code, check there. Check in your
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respective package manager for your Linux distribution or your package manager for your BSD
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flavor, or what have you, and see if it's available there. Currently, I'm running on this laptop,
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I'm running for door 27, so I would do sudo DNF search frots. And I already have installed,
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I'll provide my password, and it'll show me that it's already there. So it shows up as frots.x8664.
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So if you're running for door, install sudo DNF install frots, or if you're running some
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other Linux distribution, you can install it by whatever means they use. Once you have it installed,
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you're going to wonder how you're going to play any one of these games. Well, you have to find the
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games. I managed to find a website that has the zork trilogy available for free. Now granted,
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I don't know what the status of the licensing for these games is, if it was public domain,
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if it was, if it's just considered abandoned, but that I will leave up to you. A quick search,
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you can do a search for download zork, and it should be the first hit. As a matter of fact,
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I think even it shows the second hit off of Google shows zork one available for free download
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on archive.org. So I went with the first one, the first website listed, so you can go with that.
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The first website that I went to, which has the downloads, they are, they make available the
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DOS version and the classic macOS versions, but I recommend that you download the DOS version,
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as the files will probably be more compatible. I haven't tried it with the mac version,
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I didn't see me too, so I went with the DOS version. So on the website that I went to,
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it's, they have the zipped file for zork, so I'll give an example of how to do it with zork one,
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since that's available on archive.org, you can find it there. Once you download it,
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what you want to do is uncompress it. Now you can open a terminal, navigate to that
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location, where the unzip files are, and what you want to look for is the zork one.dat file.
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Now that will actually be in a data folder in the uncompressed location, okay? So navigate
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yourself through the terminal into that directory, and once you're in that directory,
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you can type frots, and then the name of the dat file. So I have my file uncompressed,
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I'm going to move over to the directory. So mine is in slash home slash
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clodium slash downloads slash zork hyphen trilogy slash zork one, because that's where I uncompressed it.
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So zork one, it was saved as zork one.zip, zork one was the directory that I ended up with
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after I uncompressed it. So I'm currently in the zork one directory, so I see the files,
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there's a bunch of old dots files, so nnnnc.com, reading.txt, set up.inf.
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We don't need to worry about that. What we want to do is we want to type frots,
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and then there's a datapolder, it's all caps, so it's all, okay, sensitive, data slash zork one.dat.
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I'm doing it from the root of that uncompressed directory, but you can dive into the data directory
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and then run it from there if you'd like. Now the reason why I'm doing it at the root is because
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when I want to save a game, it will save it in the directory that I launched frots front.
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Okay, so once I do that, I have frots, space, data slash zork one.dat, hit enter,
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and lo and behold, I am now in the game of zork one, the great underground empire.
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And it's telling me, I'm west of house, you are standing in an open field west of a
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white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. Now, if you remember in
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adventure, when I typed x, y, z, y, something happened, I'm going to do that right here, x, y, z,
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y. A hollow voice says full. So yeah, there's a lot of references here with the original adventure
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game. So anyone who tries to use those commands will get a humorous response. So you can also go
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ahead and save the game just like in the original. So you do save and it will ask you to enter
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the file name, the default is zork one.dat save, but you can say you can make the name whatever
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you want it to be. Okay, so I'm just going to leave it as a default. You can also restore your
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previous game by going restore, hit enter, and then says enter a file name, default is zork one.
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So whatever you named it, just pull that name up, that file up, or just pull up the original
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one that was there, and we'll bring you back to where you were. Now, to quit the game,
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cue, very simple. You wish to leave the game. Yes, hit any key to exit, and you're back at
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the terminal point. So very simple, straightforward, doesn't it? I think the only amount of work that
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you'll have is uncompressing, finding the files and uncompressing them. These should work for
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other infocom games. I know there's a bunch of other similar style text adventure games. You'll
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have to test them out yourself, but the process is pretty much the same. If you just type
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frauds and hit enter, you'll get a list of options. So you can enable sound, disable color,
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ultra piracy opcode. There's a bunch of different options here. Anything you can always check
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the man page for that and do man frauds and get some more information from there.
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Anyway, this has been Claudio M discussing frauds. We'll see what else I can bring down the pike
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as I work on my keeping my new year's resolution. Anyway, I hope we've enjoyed this episode.
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Have some fun with frauds. Find yourself a good old text adventure game and relive those
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childhood memories of playing these style games. Bye bye.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast
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network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
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was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast
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and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was
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