DOS Frotz testing request

[Geoff Oltmans]

On May 18, 2015, at 6:11 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote:

> 
> 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.

Indeed. It's been several years, but I tinkered with an after-hours project to embed Frotz in one of our products at work. It was very simple I had it working fairly well running Zork in short order with a few minor modifications.