DOS Frotz testing request

Peter Coghlan cctalk at beyondthepale.ie
Mon May 18 18:11:44 CDT 2015


David Griffith wrote:
>
> I've finished up things for a new release of Frotz, an extremely portable 
> Z-machine emulator (plays Infocom games).  The Unix port is tested and 
> ready to go, but I don't have real DOS hardware in working order.  Could I 
> get some people to try it out and let me know how it fares?  It's compiled 
> with Turbo C++ 3.0 for 16-bit DOS.  The zipfile is at 
> http://661.org/if/frotz244.zip.  Source is at 
> https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz.  Games are available at 
> http://ifarchive.org/ or https://661.org/if/ (some of my games).
>

It's not what you asked for but I was curious about "extremely portable".

I downloaded the source from github onto a VMS system and unzipped it. I
started compiling relevant looking stuff in the common directory using just the
C compiler available at hand with no command qualifiers.  Attempts to link
suggested I needed more and it looked likely that the files in the dumb
directory would satisfy the unresolved externals so I compiled those too and
linked them in.  This made all the unresolveds go away.

Having read absolutely no documentation whatsoever and never so much as looked
at a Z-machine emulator before, within 17 minutes of starting from scratch, I
had an executable which was able to make a more than passable attempt at
running several of the files in the test directory.

None of the compiles produced any errors or informational messages - there
were just two warnings for pointer mismatches due to signed versus unsigned
chars in dumb_input.c.

I'd say extremely portable is a valid description.  It's also extremely easy
to build.

> -- 
> David Griffith
> dave at 661.org
>
> A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
>

Still love that sig.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.


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