After holding off a few more days for some response on running DOS Frotz on real hardware, I decided to go ahead and release Frotz 2.44 source code.
It should appear in the IF Archive’s “unprocessed” directory in a day or so. Here are the highlights:
New Features:
- Blorb support implemented. No support for audio in Blorb files yet.
- Added an -m option for Dumb Frotz to suppress the [MORE] prompt.
- Makefile and code for compiling for 16-bit DOS.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a problem with saving and restoring in certain games.
- Added some fflush() calls to make Dumb Frotz more suitable for bot use.
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage. Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.
- Fixed assorted minor 64-bitness problems.
The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the problems with saving and restoring. I will continue developing Frotz to bring full audio support to the curses interface and eventually fold in an SDL and/or GTK interface with full audio and graphical support. Hopefully the result will resemble David Kinder’s “Windows Frotz”. As always, you can follow the development at github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz
DOS Frotz 2.44 is mostly untested on real hardware. It works fine with the DOSbox emulation environment. Testing on one particular machine running FreeDOS yields crashes. That’s the only non-emulated DOS machine test I have. Details are at github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/issues/8