This image PR episode 2004-173 entitled, Flots, a portable net machine interpreter.
It infested back Lord Eomorander, and in about 10 minutes long, and Karimaklin flag.
The summary is, how to use Flots to play no mold info context adventure games from the
18.
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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 news of 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 Fowl.
Anyway, today's episode is about a piece of software called Frots.
That spelled Box Trot Romeo Oscar Tango Zulu, and what is Frots you may be asking?
Frots is an interpreter for InfoCon games and other Zim machine games.
What's an InfoCon game?
An InfoCon games are those text adventure games by a company called InfoCon, 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 it
and play it.
So I had not 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
to text adventure games.
So yes, Frots is an interpreter for these types of games, it 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
an almost 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, there's different ports, there's
actually one for Windows, one for the iPhone, there's actually an infocompling bot
for our C called group, and one for Pony 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 Pact 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, so do ENF
search, frots, and I already have installed, though, by my password, and it will show
me that it's already there, so it shows up as frots.x86 under score 64, so if you're running
with door, install, you know, do, pseudo, the ENF install frots, or if you're running some
of their 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 anyone
in this game, what you have to find the games.
I managed to find a website that has the zortrillagee 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 a band-in-wear, 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 are probably more compatible.
I haven't tried it with Mac version, and then see me too, so I went with the DOS version.
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, under files are, and what you want to look for is the zork one
dot 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 fraughts, 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 Claudio M slash download slash zork, high-fantrylogy,
slash zork one, because that's where I uncompressed it's zork one, it was saved as zork
one dot 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
doss files, so in, and in, and see dot com, read me dot txt, set up dot INF.
We don't need to worry about that.
What we want to do is we want to type fraughts, and then there's a data folder, it's
all encaps, so it's all key sensitive, data slash zork one dot the AT.
I'm doing it from the root of that uncompressed directory, but you can dive into the data
directory and then run it from their feet 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 fraughts from.
Okay, so once I do that, I have fraughts, space, data, slash zork one dot the AT, hit enter,
and knowing 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's a small mailbox here.
Now if you remember in an 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, there's
a lot of references here with the original adventure games, 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 an original, so you do save, and it will ask you to enter file name, the default
is zork one, that save, but you can save, you can make the name whatever you want it to
be, okay, so I'm just gonna 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 name 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, q, very simple, you wish to leave the game, yes, hit any heat
eggs it, and your backends terminal points, so very simple, straightforward, doesn't, I
think the only amount of work that you'll have is uncompressant, 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 fraughts 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 fraughts, I can get some more information from there, so anyway this has been Claudio
I'm discussing fraughts, and 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 fraughts, find yourself a good old text adventure game and relive those childhood memories
of playing these style games, bye-bye, you've been listening to Hector Public Radio at
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